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Look at this photo of Ray Bradbury’s amazing desk. (via)

"I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room."

Ray Bradbury (via libraryland)

(via gatsbylives)

Ray Bradbury Wrote Me Back →

Writer Dominic Umile explains what Ray Bradbury’s vast imagination meant to him during a period of sojourn in his life, and what it was like to receive a handwritten note from the author. Great stuff, and full of classic Bradbury-isms like his noun-based writing techniques and how being a writer fundamentally means questioning oneself.

Good reads: "The City," by Ray Bradbury →

I mean, gosh, this is just an imperfectly-OCRed version of the story, and if you really want to see the real thing by all means pick up the book. But even here, reading off this Scribd document on a glowing computer screen, I am transported back fifteen years to the dusty Hardin County library, where I pulled down a book of Bradbury stories off the shelf and sat on one of those metal wheeled library stools and just read.

Bradbury always makes me miss the musty-sweet smell of that building’s old air conditioner, the claustrophobic science fiction stacks on the second floor, and the way the thick old walls would slow summer afternoons to a crawl. It’s ironic that a forward-thinking science fiction writer could create such a sense of nostalgia, but then Bradbury’s magic always leads back to childhood somehow, to stillness, to the sense that the world is a much larger and stranger place than we give it credit for.

"Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did."

Ray Bradbury talks about why his books are widely taught, despite his lack of a college education. From Sam Weller’s Listen to The Echos: The Ray Bradbury Interviews, coming out next month. (via Moby Lives)

Mythologist of Our Age →

Slate’s Nathaniel Rich has an appreciation of the work of Ray Bradbury, who will turn 90 soon. Now would be a good time to reread a story or two. (via The Rumpus)

"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is 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. 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

"Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. "

Ray Bradbury (via booklover)

"Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries, because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

Ray Bradbury

"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage."

Ray Bradbury (via samsaramotel)

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

Ray Bradbury