Ray Bradbury Quotes

I'm not sure I would have ever started to draw, let alone write, if my childhood hadn't been so happy. It was a mixture of comfort and adventure. An excellent mixture!

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

I've always had a really great time being in movies and writing music when I get home. The more creative I am, the more it feeds into other creative aspects of my life.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

I think of myself as a little kid, and I had a wild imagination, but it was something that was encouraged and supported, which helped steer me into the arts.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

What inspired me to become an author? I think it was the snow in New York. I looked out the window and I said, 'Well, I have to get dressed every morning to go to teach, but if I write a book, I can stay home in my bathrobe, eat candy corn.'

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

You want to know what makes me tick, I'll tell you what makes me tick. I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn; I read a two-penny magazine called 'The Hawk's Nest.' Nobody entered that nest that didn't leave a little richer and a little wiser. And that 11-year-old boy said, 'Isn't that a wonderful thing.' And that's all there is to it.

At the age of eight I became, in my own eyes at least, a writer.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

I live for the blank page.

There was a singer-songwriter who slept on our couch for a year when I was about 7 or 8. She used to sing these songs for us, and I loved it. It was magical to watch her.

Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now.

I'm still driven by the feeling I had when I wrote my first book or read a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle adventure.

But, yeah, I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, 'Oh, this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way, and I love that time.

You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

As a kid, we had one television channel and a sad little roller rink. And there was not much else to do. So I used my imagination all of the time growing up. That's the main way I played. When we moved and I went to high school, I did my first play, and I was completely addicted to theatre. It felt like home; it felt natural.

The seed of an idea laying dormant in an old sketchbook is fed the missing ingredient from a new experience. Trying to share some of these experiences, some of the wonders, is one of the reasons why I do books.