At that age? When we are accustomed to responding to peer pressure? Where did I find the courage to rebel, change my life, live alone? I don't want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was. I found the cure: go back to collecting, no matter what.
I named the sickness: my tearing up the strips. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What's the cure? I was able, obviously, to answer all of the above. How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting? Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it. TO MY FINEST TEACHER, JENNET JOHNSON, WITH LOVEģ RUN FAST, STAND STILL, OR, THE THING AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS, OR, NEW GHOSTS FROM OLD MINDSĦ9 JUST THIS SIDE OF BYZANTIUM: DANDELION WINE Published by Joshua Odell Editions Post Office Box 2158, Santa Barbara, CA 93120 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bradbury, Ray, 1920- Zen in the art of writing. Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgments to reprint may be found on page 165. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Since 1985 he has adapted his stories for "The Ray Bradbury Theater" on USA Cable television.Ĭopyright © 1994 Ray Bradbury Enterprises.
Films have been made of his "The Picasso Summer," The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the short animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright, based on his story of the history of flight, was nominated for an Academy Award. And in 1961 he wrote Orson Welles's narration for King of Kings. The next year he wrote the screenplays for It Came from Outer Space and Moby Dick. He began writing for the movies in 1952-with the script for his own Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ray Bradbury has published some twenty-seven books-novels, stories, plays, essays, and poems-since his first story appeared when he was twenty years old.