Ray Bradbury Stories Quotations

All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.

A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.

You let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting it, you relive it.

Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

There is only one type of story in the world-your story.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg-I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.

Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.

There are a lot of wonderful women writers who would be good influences on writers. You've got to spread yourself out and educate yourself with all kinds of stories.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.