Hello Dear Readers! Yesterday I was lucky enough to hang out with one of my favorite dead people, author Ray Bradbury via the magic of YouTube.  

“The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.”  –Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, who recently died at the age of 91, was best known for works such as  “Fahrenheit 451,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “The Martian Chronicles,“ “Dandelion Wine“and “The Illustrated Man” to name just a few of the hundreds of stories he wrote.

Ray Bradbury was a man who experienced the fullness of life in the amusement park of his wild and bubbling imagination and lived to write about it.

“My stories run up and bite me on the leg.  I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite, when I finish, the idea let’s go and runs off.” – Ray Bradbury

I recently found a wonderful interview he did.  It’s from an old PBS show called Day at Night that’s been digitally remastered.  It’s a half hour long but well worth watching. His insights on life and writing are fascinating.

Ray Bradbury grew up in a family of modest means.  Suffice it to say, when he graduated from high school, he was wearing the suit of his murdered uncle who had been shot in a hold up.  The family didn’t even have enough money to repair the bullet hole.

“Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.”–Ray Bradbury

By age eleven, Bradbury was filled to the brim with stories, fairy tales, myths and the words of Edgar Allan Poe and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  It was like these stories seeped into his subconscious and became a part of his DNA. Interestingly enough, he never considered himself a science fiction writer but a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology.

Love and the Feeling of Language

Ray Bradbury kept a sign over his typewriter that said “Don’t Think.”  Because he thought that you must never think at the typewriter, you must feel.  “At the typewriter, you should be living, not thinking.  What you try to do as a creative person is surprise yourself — and the only way to do this is to be very emotional and react and get it out of yourself.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” –Ray Bradbury

“I believe the universe created us — we are an audience for miracles. ” –Ray Bradbury

On Character

Ray Bradbury thought the typewriter should be a Ojai board that your hands move on to reveal things about yourself you didn’t  know. For instance, Montag, in Fahrenheit 451 was Ray Bradbury discovering himself. “There are sides to ourselves that are destructive — so you bring them out in the open and find ways of making them creative.”

 Many of his books were made into movies. One of my favorites is The Illustrated man.  Here’s a clip:

And finally I’ll leave you with this wonderful quote:

“From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future, I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.” — Ray Bradbury

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Until next time  . . . I love you