Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.
Interpretation
Stay focused on your tasks by eliminating distractions.
This quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining focus and not allowing external influences to disrupt your work. Ray Bradbury suggests that if you carry unfinished tasks into the next day, you risk overthinking and complicating them unnecessarily, often in an effort to meet others' expectations rather than your own.
In practice
This quote can inspire students preparing for exams to minimize distractions.
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer. Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview (Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)
I never went to college, so I went to the library.
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour.
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.
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.
You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together.
Life opens up opportunities to you, and you either take them or you stay afraid of taking them.
Pressure is a word that is misused in our vocabulary. When you start thinking of pressure, it's because you've started to think of failure.
You are merely not feeling equal to the tasks before you.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.