What should I do?" "Throw up in your typewriter every morning." "Yeah." "Clean up every noon.
Interpretation
Creativity requires effort and often involves messiness before achieving clarity.
This quote by Ray Bradbury emphasizes the chaotic and sometimes unpleasant nature of the creative process. It suggests that true artistic expression involves a raw, unfiltered output ('throw up in your typewriter'), and that one must be willing to engage in this messy process and then refine their work ('clean up every noon') to create something worthwhile.
In practice
A motivational speech about embracing the challenges of the creative process.
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.
I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.
I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.
I'm leaving the screen because I don't think I am very good in the pictures and I have this beautiful dream that I'm elegant on the stage.
When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.
I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.
Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.
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