Ray Bradbury Quotes

Writing is my shelter. I don't hide behind the words; I use them to dig inside my heart to find the truth.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Seek not abroad, for in the inner man dwells the truth.

Dreams really tell you about yourself more than anything else in this world could ever tell you.

If you cannot find the truth within yourself, where else do you expect to find it?

People just overshoot trying to find God. They're going outside and trying everything. They don't realize that it's right inside themselves.

There's so much of our psychological makeup which is impermissible for us to explore because it's inappropriate or perverse or scary. I'm interested in exploring that in myself. I try to be honest with myself about everything that I feel. I'm not saying I'm able to do that all the time, but it's something I'm interested in.

Your desires and true beliefs have a way of playing blind man's bluff. You must corner the inner facts.

One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.

You have to be willing to expose yourself, at least to yourself, to get to some kind of truth about a character.

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

Self-awareness involves deep personal honesty. It comes from asking and answering hard questions.

The longest journey is the journey inward.

Through my own observations. I am convinced that an absolutely honest and direct inquiry into oneself will lead to understanding.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

One of the other reasons for writing this book [My Beloved World] was to hold on to the person you first met. More of the world knows about me now and follows me in a way that never happened before. I didn't want me, the inside of me, to change. Because I liked Sonia, the Sonia who has been. So another reason for writing the book was to hold on to that - whatever the best in Sonia was, to try to capture it.

You're revealing something about yourself in a more exaggerated, more fleshed-out way, and it awakens something in you that maybe you didn't know you had.