“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”
More from Ray Bradbury on Writing
“Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.”
“It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious.”
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
“Create a character with an obsession, then follow.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
Vladimir Nabokov
6 quotes“The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview,...”
Milan Kundera
6 quotes“Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”