If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
Interpretation
The quote expresses frustration with traditional education and its constraints on creativity.
Ray Bradbury's quote highlights the tension between conventional teaching methods and the innovative, often unconventional writing styles of creative individuals. He suggests that if educators cannot appreciate challenging and imaginative sentence structures, they should not impose their rigid standards on creative expression, instead indulging in their own less inspiring creations.
In practice
During a speech about creative writing, this quote can emphasize the importance of originality.
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 canβt imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You donβt 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.
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.
The cognitive skills prized by the American educational establishment and measured by achievement tests are only part of what is required for success in life. Character skills are equally important determinants of wages, education, health and many other significant aspects of flourishing lives.
There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly-but then less is learned there; so what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.
Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.
Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.
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