How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.
Interpretation
Working with the wrong motives can hinder creativity and distort our understanding of success and failure.
In this quote, Ray Bradbury emphasizes the detrimental effects of pursuing work for unworthy reasons or superficial goals. He suggests that when individuals align their efforts with incorrect motives, it can stifle their creative potential and lead to a skewed perception of what true success and failure entail, thus emphasizing the importance of intrinsic motivation and passion in the creative process.
In practice
A motivational speaker could use this quote to inspire young artists at an exhibition.
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.
People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.
Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.
It's hard to be fully creative without structure and constraint. Try to paint without a canvas. Creativity and freedom are two sides of the same coin. I like the best of both worlds. Want freedom? Get organized. Want to get organized? Get creative.
If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you're writing, ask yourself what's bothering you and write about that. Sometimes your creative energy is like water in a kinked hose, and before thoughts can flow on the topic at hand, you have to straighten the hose by attending to whatever is preoccupying you.
I'm not an extraordinary worker, I'm an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies-even that of writing.
I think that in order to struggle you have to be creative. In my life, creativity has been something that has sustained me; it awoke my spiritual struggle.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.