Ray Bradbury Quotes

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

People say it's cathartic to write a book, but it turned out to be quite painful!

I come from a place of darkness when I write because I'm always trying to figure things out. It's kind of like my own therapy when I write music. It's me working through my own problems hopefully. And putting it into a song.

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.

It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It's the greatest secret of the world.

I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.

I've got some issues that nobody can see and all of these emotions are pouring out of me I bring them to the light for you it's only right

I never wrote anything that was published until I was forty.

Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.

There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

As she had been walking from the ward to that room, she had felt such pure hatred that now she had no more rancor left in her heart. She had finally allowed her negative feelings to surface, feelings that had been repressed for years in her soul. She had actually FELT them, and they were no longer necessary, they could leave.

If you're angry, you don't have to write a poem dealing with the cause of your anger. But it needs to be an angry poem. So go ahead... write one. I know you're at least a little bit angry with me. And when you're done with your poem, decipher it as if you'd just found it printed in a textbook and know absolutely nothing about its author. The results can be amazing...and scary. But it's always cheaper than a therapist.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?

I remind myself Vincent van Gogh died without having sold a single painting. Like, art is not measured by the trappings that people attached to it. It's the thing itself, and so, as you know, it's been a dream of mine to write songs for Disney, and so, it's really exciting to finally hear. It's two and a half years.

What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.

I do my best to write my way through it. It helps the laughing, reflective part come quicker.

It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.

I had more trouble than I had a sense of utility or satisfaction. But it served to occupy me and to keep me occupied in a field that I love - which was cinema - while I was waiting to realize the film that I wanted to do, which was Once Upon a Time in America, which took ten years of thinking and working to realize.

When I'm going through something that has a big impact on my life, it's much easier to sing.