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This Afternoon, Burn Down The House. Tomorrow, Pour Critical Water Upon The Simmering Coals. Time Enough To Think And Cut And Rewrite Tomorrow. But Today-explode-f Ly-apart-disint Egrate! 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, By Reading Your Story, Will Catch Fire, Too?

-Ray Bradbury

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This Afternoon, Burn Down

Ray Bradbury

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This Afternoon, Burn Down The House. Tomorrow, Pour Critical Water Upon The Simmering Coals. Time Enough To Think And Cut And Rewrite Tomorrow. But Today-explode-f Ly-apart-disint Egrate! 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, By Reading Your Story, Will Catch Fire, Too?

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There Is More Than One Way To Burn A Book.

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Life Is About Trying Things To See If They Work.

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The Most Improbable Tales Can Be Made Believable, If Your Reader, Through His Sense, Feels Certain That He Stands At The Middle Of Events.

I Have Two Rules In Life - To Hell With It, Whatever It Is, And Get Your Work Done.

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Recreate The World In Your Own Image And Make It Better For Your Having Been Here.

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I Believe The Universe Created Us - We Are An Audience For Miracles. In That Sense, I Guess, I'm Religious.

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I Shall Remain On Mars And Read A Book.

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Treasure This Day And Treasure Yourself, Truly, Neither Will Ever Happen Again.

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Plot Is No More Than Footprints Left In The Snow After Your Characters Have Run By On Their Way To Incredible Destinations.

A Good Night Sleep, Or A Ten Minute Bawl, Or A Pint Of Chocolate Ice Cream, Or All Three Together, Is Good Medicine.

Chocolate Ice Cream

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Looking Back Over A Lifetime, You See That Love Was The Answer To Everything.

We Have Too Many Cellphones. We've Got Too Many Internets. We Have Got To Get Rid Of Those Machines. We Have Too Many Machines Now.

That's The Great Secret Of Creativity. You Treat Ideas Like Cats: You Make Them Follow You.

You Must Stay Drunk On Writing So Reality Cannot Destroy You.

How Working For The Wrong Motives Poisons Our Creativity And Warps Our Ideas Of Success And Failure.

You're Insane!" "i Won't Argue That Point.

He Wore His Happiness Like A Mask And The Girl Had Run Off Across The Lawn With The Mask And There Was No Way Of Going To Knock On Her Door And Ask For It Back.

You Knew The Sweetness Of Now, Now, Tonight! Who Cares For Tomorrow, Tomorrow Is Nothing, Yesterday Is Over And Done, Tonight Live, Tonight!

I Want To Feel All There Is To Feel, He Thought. Let Me Feel Tired, Now, Let Me Feel Tired. I Mustn't Forget, I'm Alive, I Know I'm Alive, I Mustn't Forget It Tonight Or Tomorrow Or The Day After That.

Venice Was And Is Full Of Lost Places Where People Put Up For Sale The Last Worn Bits Of Their Souls, Hoping No One Will Buy.

Kill Two Birds With One Stone, Feed The Homeless To The Hungry.

Grandfather's Been Dead All These Years, But If You Lifted My Skull, By God, In The Convolutions Of My Brain You'd Find The Big Ridges Of His Thumbprint. He Touched Me. As I Said Earlier, He Was A Sculptor. 'i Hate A Roman Named Status Quo!' He Said To Me. 'stuff Your Eyes With Wonder,' He Said, 'live As If You'd Drop Dead In Ten Seconds. See The World. It's More Fantastic Than Any Dream Made Or Paid For In Factories.

No Use Going To Class Unless You Go To The Library.

The Great Fun In My Life Has Been Getting Up Every Morning And Rushing To The Typewriter Because Some New Idea Has Hit Me.

But No Man's A Hero To Himself. I've Lived With Me A Lifetime. I Know Everything Worth Knowing About Myself--" ~something Wicked This Way Comes

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Reality And Fiction Are Different In That Fiction Has To Make Sense.

It's Poor Judgment', Said Grandpa 'to Call Anything By A Name. We Don't Know What A Hobgoblin Or A Vampire Or A Troll Is. Could Be Lots Of Things. You Can't Heave Them Into Categories With Labels And Say They'll Act One Way Or Another. That'd Be Silly. They're People. People Who Do Things. Yes, That's The Way To Put It. People Who *do* Things.

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It Was A Great Place To Write A Novel About Book Burning, In The Library Basement.

He Glanced Back At The Wall. How Like A Mirror, Too, Her Face. Impossible; For How Many People Did You Know Who Reflected Your Own Light To You? People Were More Often--he Searched For A Simile, Found One In His Work--torches, Blazing Away Until They Whiffed Out. How Rarely Did Other People's Faces Take Of You And Throw Back To You Your Own Expression, Your Own Innermost Trembling Thought?

I Was Doing A Terrible Thing In Using The Very Books You Clung To, To Rebut You On Every Hand, On Every Point! What Traitors Books Can Be! You Think They're Backing You Up, And Then They Turn On You. Others Can Use Them, Too, And There You Are, Lost In The Middle Of The Moor, In A Great Welter Of Nouns And Verbs And Adjectives.

Half The Fun Of The Travel Is The Esthetic Of Lostness.

I Write All Of My Novels And Stories, As You Have Seen, In A Great Surge Of Delightful Passion. Only Recently, Glancing At The Novel, I Realized That Montag Is Named After A Paper Manufacturing Company. And Faber, Of Course, Is A Maker Of Pencils! What A Sly Thing My Subconscious Was, To Name Them Thus. And Not Tell Me!

Each Person Was Himself One Alone. One Oneness, A Unit In A Society, But Always Afraid, Always Alone. If I Should Scream, If I Should Call For Help, Would Anyone Hear Would It Even Matter?

When Rivers Flooded, When Fire Fell From The Sky, What A Fine Place The Library Was, The Many Rooms, The Books. With Luck, No One Found You. How Could They!--when You Were Off To Tanganyika In '98, Cairo In 1812, Florence In 1492!?

Science And Religion Have To Go Hand In Hand With The Mystery, Because There's A Certain Point Beyond Which You Say, "there Are No Answers."

When You're Older You Want To Learn From Other People.

My Business Is To Prevent The Future.

I Don't Write Science Fiction. I've Only Done One Science Fiction Book And That's Fahrenheit 451, Based On Reality. Science Fiction Is A Depiction Of The Real. Fantasy Is A Depiction Of The Unreal.

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.

I'm Inclined To Believe You Need The Psychiatrist.

I Was Never Young. Whoever I Was Then Is Dead. That's More Of Your Quills. I Don't Want A Hide Full, Thanks. I Have Always Figured That You Die Each Day And And Each Day Is A Is A Box, You See, All Numbered And Neat; But Never Go Back And Lift The Lids, Because You Have Died A Couple Thousand Times In Your Life, And That's A Lot Of Corpses, Each Dead A Different Way, Each With A Worse Expression. Each Of Those Days Is A Different You, Somebody You Don't Know Or Understand Or Want To Understand.

Somewhere In Him, A Shadow Turned Mournfully Over. You Had To Run With A Night Like This So The Sadness Could Not Hurt

Don't Write For Money. Write Because You Love To Do Something. If You Write For Money, You Won't Write Anything Worth Reading.

Dandelion Wine. The Words Were Summer On The Tongue. The Wine Was Summer Caught And Stoppered...sealed Away For Opening On A January Day With Snow Falling Fast And The Sun Unseen For Weeks.

People Try To Force Things. It's Disastrous. Just Leave Your Mind Alone. Your Intuition Knows What It Wants To Write, So Get Out Of The Way.

Beware The Autumn People

And They Were All, When Their Souls Grew Warm, Poets.

Don't Think About Things, Just Do Them; Don't Predict Them, Just Make Them.

No Person Ever Died That Had A Family.

Why Then You're As Mad As Me. No, Madder. For I Distrust 'reality' And Its Moron Mother, The Universe, While You Fasten Your Innocence To Fallible Devices Which Pretend At Happy Endings.

If You Had Your Way You’d Pass A Law To Abolish All The Little Jobs, The Little Things. But Then You’d Leave Yourselves Nothing To Do Between The Big Jobs And You’d Have A Devil Of A Time Thinking Up Things To Do So You Wouldn’t Go Crazy. Instead Of That, Why Not Let Nature Show You A Few Things? Cutting Grass And Pulling Weeds Can Be A Way Of Life, Son.

He Knew What The Wind Was Doing To Them, Where It Was Taking Them, To All The Secret Places That Were Never So Secret Again In Life.

Do What You Love And Love What You Do. Don’t Do Anything For Money. Everything Should Be For Love.

I Don't Like Being Up High. It Took Me Three Days To Get To The Top Of The Eiffel Tower.

The Huge Round Lunar Clock Was A Gristmill. Shake Down All The Grains Of Time—the Big Grains Of Centuries, And The Small Grains Of Years, And The Tiny Grains Of Hours And Minutes—and The Clock Pulverized Them, Slid Time Silently Out In All Directions In A Fine Pollen, Carried By Cold Winds To Blanket The Town Like Dust, Everywhere. Spores From That Clock Lodged In Your Flesh To Wrinkle It, To Grow Bones To Monstrous Size, To Burst Feet From Shoes Like Turnips. Oh, How That Great Machine…dispensed Time In Blowing Weathers.

Life Should Be Touched, Not Strangled.

When A Man Talks From His Heart, In His Moment Of Truth, He Speaks Poetry.

Science-fiction Balances You On The Cliff. Fantasy Shoves You Off.

Live As If You'd Drop Dead In Ten Seconds.

How Men Envy And Often Hate These Warm Clocks, These Wives, Who Know They Will Live Forever. So What Do We Do? We Men Turn Terribly Mean, Because We Can't Hold To The World Or Ourselves Or Anything. We Are Blind To Continuity, All Breaks Down, Falls, Melts, Stops, Rots, Or Runs Away. So, Since We Cannot Shape Time, Where Does That Leave Men? Sleepless. Staring.

We Do Need Knowledge. And Perhaps In A Thousand Years We Might Pick Smaller Cliffs To Jump Off. The Books Are To Remind Us What Asses And Fools We Are.

There Is More Than One Way To Burn A Book. And The World Is Full Of People Running About With Lit Matches. Every Minority, Be It Baptist/unitarian, Irish/italian/octogenarian/zen Buddhist, Zionist/seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/republican, Mattachine/foursquaregospel Feels It Has The Will, The Right, The Duty To Douse The Kerosene, Light The Fuse. Every Dimwit Editor Who Sees Himself As The Source Of All Dreary Blanc-mange Plain Porridge Unleavened Literature, Licks His Guillotine And Eyes The Neck Of Any Author Who Dares To Speak Above A Whisper Or Write Above A Nursery Rhyme.

I Am Not A Science Fiction Writer. I Am A Fantasy Writer. But The Label Got Put On Me And Stuck.

The Trouble With Jim Was He Looked At The World And Could Not Look Away. And When You Never Look Away All Your Life, By The Time You Are Thirteen You Have Done Twenty Years Taking In The Laundry Of The World.

Only If The Third Necessary Thing Could Be Given Us. Number One, As I Said: Quality Of Information. Number Two: Leisure To Digest It. And Number Three: The Right To Carry Out Actions Based On What We Learn From The Interaction Of The First Two.

Everything Of Mine Is Permeated With My Love Of Ideas-both Big And Small. It Doesn't Matter What It Is, As Long As It Grabs Me And Holds Me, Facinates Me. And Then I'll Run Out And Something About It... I Write For Fun.

...passing Swiftly On Toward Further Darknesses, But Moving Also Toward A New Sun.

When You Go Home Tonight, Make A List Of The People Who Are Impediments, Who Don't Believe In You, And Call Them Up And Tell Them, 'get The Hell Out Of My Life.' You Don't Need Them. Writing Is Tough Enough Without Having People Around You Who Contribute To A Writer's Insecurity.

I Would Not See Our Candle Blown Out In The Wind. It Is A Small Thing, This Dear Gift Of Life Handed Us Mysteriously Out Of Immensity. I Would Not Have That Gift Expire... If I Seem To Be Beating A Dead Horse Again And Again, I Must Protest: No! I Am Beating, Again And Again, Living Man To Keep Him Awake And Move His Limbs And Jump His Mind... What's The Use Of Looking At Mars Through A Telescope, Sitting On Panels, Writing Books, If It Isn't To Guarantee, Not Just The Survival Of Mankind, But Mankind Surviving Forever!

You Have To Know How To Accept Rejection And Reject Acceptance.

A Book Is A Loaded Gun In The House Next Door...who Knows Who Might Be The Target Of The Well-read Man?

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Margaret Haddix

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