Bradburyworks - Bradbury Works

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

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

Ray Bradbury — Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

1970 cover art by Richard Clifton-Dey for The Small Assassin, by Ray Bradbury

“So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”

— Ray Bradbury, “Zen in the Art of Writing”

"All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe."

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

There I strolled, lost in love, down the corridors, and through the stacks, touching books, pulling volumes out, turning pages, thrusting volumes back, drowning in all the good stuffs that are the essence of libraries. What a place, don’t you agree, to write a novel about burning books in the Future! —Ray Bradbury/Zen in the Art of Writing

"It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason."

– Ray Bradbury

I read that a few years ago and it was WILD. I only remember picking it up because it was mentioned in an episode of Criminal Minds and it sounded crazy haha

It really is! I find a lot of Ray Bradbury stories completely out there, ESPECIALLY considering how old they are!

And obligatory favourite quotes, and they are all related to death, because of course, Ray 💀💀💀

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.

Oh, death in space was most humorous.

And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying.

The Last Night of the World

“Maybe because it was never October 19, 1969, ever before in history, and now it is and that’s it; because this date means more than any other date ever meant; because it’s the year when things are as they are all over the world and that’s why it’s the end.”

— Ray Bradbury

"This is dedicated to those who have lost the game of the elements, by one who has always escaped . . . until tonight"

A. R. Tilburne (1887-1965) - Illustration for Ray Bradbury's 'The Wind'

(Weird Tales - March 1943)