Ray Bradbury Quotes

The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.

I wrote 'Show Me the Way' in the morning and wrote 'Baby, I Love Your Way' in the afternoon of the same day. I've been trying to figure out what I ate for breakfast that morning ever since!

It's gotta feel natural. I'm always into that, and after awhile, if I am working on a song too long and trying to make something out of it that it's not... it's best just to stop and move on.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

You need to open up so that more comes through. And you can just feel that when your ego is not in the way and when you're letting it be what it wants to be. You have to let it be what it wants to be as opposed to what you think it should be.

You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote 'Search.' There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.

If I'm in the middle of a take and I start to think about what I'm doing, I just mess up and I have to stop and so I find that for me, you really need to trust your instinct.

When I over-prepare, I try to let it all go and forget all about it when the camera rolls, so I can just be present with the other actors and allow what's going to happen to happen without too much preconception.

I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.

The muse holds no appointments. You can never call on it. I don't understand people who get up at 9 o'clock in the morning, put on the coffee and sit down to write.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

That's when the great stuff happens, when you're not checking yourself all the time, being critical of yourself and what other people are doing.

Writing lyrics is part spontaneous, intuitive and part really thought through and carefully analyzed as you write it. It's a mixture of two approaches, and I imagine writing anything is like that, really. Some of it just flows, and you just go with it.

Writing-wise, I like to have a lot of things on the burners at once, because when I hit a wall, I like to move on to the thing I haven't hit a wall on.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

Sometimes things just fall out of your head on the paper, and if you're smart, you learn not to touch them.

You can't rush inspiration.

I've learned that I get blocked when my subconscious mind is telling me that I've taken the work in a wrong direction, and that once I start listening to what my subconscious is trying to tell me, I can work out the problem and get moving again.

The rule of improvisation I took to heart was, 'Don't think.' I tend to over-think things, so that was a big lesson for me.