Zen in the Art of Writing Quotes

“If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere—and went.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in The Art of Writing

“And when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in The Art of Writing

“From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel,”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in The Art of Writing

“If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere—and went.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in The Art of Writing

“It isn't easy. Nobody has ever done it consistently. Those who try hardest, scare it off into the woods. Those who turn their backs and saunter along, whistling softly between their teeth, hear it treading quietly behind them, lured by a carefully acquired disdain.
We are of course speaking of the Muse.
The term has fallen out the language in our time. More often than not when we hear it now we smile and summon up images of some fragile Greek goddess, dressed in ferns, harp in hand, stroking the brow of you perspiring Scribe.
The Muse, then, is that most terrified of all the virgins. She starts if she hears a sound, pales if you ask her questions, spins and vanishes if you disturb her dress.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I hope we will not get too serious here, for seriousness is the Red Death if we let it move too freely amongst us. Its freedom is our prison and our defeat and death. A good idea should worry us like a dog. We should not, in turn, worry it into the grave, smother it with intellect, pontificate it into snoozing, kill it with the death of a thousand analytical slices.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“What do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love, or what do you hate? Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate as well as in love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in The Art of Writing

“How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“The history of each story, then, should read almost like a weather report: Hot today, cool tomorrow. This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today—explode—fly apart—disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“Thomas Wolfe ate the world and vomited lava. Dickens dined at a different table every hour of his life. Molière, tasting society, turned to pick up his scalpel, as did Pope and Shaw.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“When it is a long damp November in my soul, and I think too much and perceive too little, I know it is high time to get back to that boy with the tennis shoes, the high fevers, the multitudinous joys, and the terrible nightmares.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“HOW TO CLIMB THE TREE OF LIFE, THROW ROCKS AT YOURSELF, AND GET DOWN AGAIN WITHOUT BREAKING YOUR BONES OR YOUR SPIRIT A PREFACE WITH A TITLE NOT MUCH LONGER THAN THE BOOK”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“So I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World’s Fairs and began to write. 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. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“Only this: if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is—excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn’t it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, “That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!” Then and only then is writing worthwhile. Quite”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in The Art of Writing

“Be pragmatic, then. If you’re not happy with the way your writing has gone, you might give my method a try. If you do, I think you might easily find a new definition for Work. And the word is LOVE. 1973”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in The Art of Writing

“Where did I find the courage to rebel, change my life, live alone?

I don't want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was. Without him, I could not have survived to introduce these essays.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“The best sculpture, like the head of Nefertiti, says again and again, "The Beautiful One was here, is here, and will be here, forever.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I leave you now at the bottom of your own stair, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pen, and a list to be made.
Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness.
Your own Thing stands waiting way up there in the attic shadows.
If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page... your Thing at the top of the stairs in your own private night... May well come down.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures. Sometimes it is a little hard to tell the trash from the treasure, so we hold back, afraid to declare ourselves.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I am not one thing. I am many things that America has been in my time. I had enough sense to keep moving, learning, growing. And I have never reviled or turned my back on the things I grew out of.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Because I wanted to do, I did. Where I wanted to feed, I fed.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Others have criticized, and they have criticized themselves, into embarrassment.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere—and went.
I have not so much thought my way through life as done things and found what it was and who I was after the doing.
Each tale was a way of finding selves. Each self found each day slightly different from the one found twenty-four hours later.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Are we polluted? We can unpollute ourselves.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I do wish to run, seize this greatest time in all the history of man to be alive, stuff my senses with it, eye it, touch it, listen to it, smell it, taste it, and hope that others will run with me, pursuing and pursued by ideas and ideas-made machines.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“So, lost, erased, you seek a lifetime's days for it
And dig deep to find the sweet instructions there
Put by when God first circuited and printed thee to life:

"Go hence! do this! do that! do yet another thing! This self is yours! Be it!"

And what is that?! you cry at hearthing breast, Is there no rest? No, only journeying to be yourself.

And even as the Birthmark vanishes, in seashell ear

Now fading to a sigh, His last words send you in the world:

"Not mother, father, grandfather are you.

Be not another. Be the self I signed you in your blood.

I swarm your flesh with you. Seek that.

And, finding, be what no one else can be.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You