When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the early influences of literature in shaping creativity and imagination.
In this passage, Ray Bradbury reminisces about his childhood experiences with science-fiction magazines, highlighting how they sparked his imagination and creativity. The mention of 'Amazing Stories' and its vivid cover art illustrates the profound impact that literature and visual art can have on young minds, fostering a lifelong passion for storytelling and artistic expression.
In practice
In a book club discussion about the influence of childhood reading on authorship.
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.
If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.
I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.
Oh! snatched away in beauty's bloom,_x000D_ _x000D_ On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;_x000D_ _x000D_ But on thy turf shall roses rear_x000D_ _x000D_ Their leaves, the earliest of the year.
I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.
No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.
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