Ray Bradbury Quotes

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

I don't start writing a script until I can see it all in my head, then it's a matter of getting it down in white heat.

'The Lake of Dreams' grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

My writing process is very organic. I start with an idea. I have the general story arc and the cast. But then I sit down to write, and things change.

I keep drawing inspiration from people every day. All of a sudden, something strikes me so hard and dramatically, and then a dream comes - I sit down, cut it off and make a script out of it.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

Traditionally, the only way I come up with cartoons is by sitting at my desk and thinking.

I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.

I would worry if I wasn't coming up with ideas, if I wasn't inspired.

If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

I wake up from dreams and go, 'Wow, put this down on paper'. The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face.

Freud believed that our dreams sometimes recapitulate a speech, a comment we've heard or something that we've read. I always had compositions in my dreams. They would be a joke, a piece of a novel, a witticism or a piece of dialogue from a play, and I would dream them. I would actually express them line by line in the dream. Sometimes after waking up I would remember a snatch or two and write them down. There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.

I think that we can learn so much if we pay attention to our dreams, whether when we are asleep or in waking dreams. There are connections that are absolutely incredible.

Ideas are floating like fish. Desire for an idea is like a bait on a hook. If you desire an idea, it pulls and it makes a kind of a bait. Ideas will come swimming up. And you don't know them until they enter the conscious mind. And then bingo! There it is! You know it instantly. And then more come in. If you go fishing for ideas, a lot of ideas will just pop in. And one of them will make you fall in love.

As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.

When I journal, I write about images that I've seen that I think might make good stories. I write about things that I hear that I think I can turn into a story. I write about the story that I'm working on and where I think it might go.

The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.