Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury

American Fantasty, Horror, Science Fiction and Mystery Writer

"Why have you been so blind? Why have you never seen? The slave and master in one skin Is all your history, no more, no less Confess! This is what you've been."

"With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar."

"Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future."

"You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance."

"Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for."

"You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library every day of your life."

"You can't try to do things; you simply must do them."

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

"You can make yourself happy or miserable - it's the same amount of effort."

"You fail only if you stop writing."

"You have to live in a cloud of emotions. You rev yourself up. Give yourself time in the middle of the afternoon, or when you"

"You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less. Edited by entrepreneur John M. Shanahan, who created the wildly successful Hooked on Phonics program, this wonderful book presents the best that has been thought and said on every imaginable topic."

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

"You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers."

"Young writers shouldn"

"You're a hopeless romantic, said Faber. It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No, no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what i mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts."

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

"You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down."

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

"I've always thought that the power of any country is the sum of the total of its individuals. Each individual rich with ideas, with concepts, rich with his own revolution."

"You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be."

"You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it."

"Inhabit the mystery."

"In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.?"

"Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.?"

"That?s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.?"

"We have our Arts so we won?t die of Truth.?"