Exploring Ray Bradbury's Creative Philosophy

James Day, public television pioneer and chairman of the CUNY TV Advisory Board, passed away in April 2008. His legacy includes the series Day at Night, which aired for 130 episodes beginning in 1973. The program features interviews with many of the great thinkers and achievers of the 20th century. These 30-year-old programs have been restored. The interviews remain fresh and relevant today, exploring issues that are still important to society. Showing them again is CUNY TV's tribute to Jim and his contributions to public television. Ray Bradbury's publishers refer to him simply as the world's greatest living science fiction writer. Some might take exception to the description, but only to argue that what he writes is not science fiction. but fantasy. Stories that tell us little about science, but a great deal about the netherworld of imagination buried deep in all of us. In addition to more than a thousand short stories, several novels, and a handful of plays, Ray Bradbury has written poetry and scenarios. He adapted the novel, Moby Dick, for the movies, and has seen several of his own stories made into motion pictures, among them Fahrenheit 451. His writing has appeared in virtually every American magazine publishing quality fiction and in over a hundred anthologies of short stories. Ray, I'd like to put myself first on the side of those who regard your writing as fantasy rather than science fiction. you a question about fantasy. I suppose that like myself you grew up believing that to fantasize was the same as to daydream, to be idle, to be a kind of a ne'er-do-well. And yet I know that you don't look upon fantasy as a fantasy. fantasizing as something that's evil? No, and it's a shame that this concept ever got going with any people at all, because I've always claimed that the ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow. Boys and girls at the age of 10, 11, 12, 13, right on up through the most important time of their day, or especially at night before going to sleep, is dreaming themselves into becoming something, into being something. So when you're a child, you begin to dream yourself into a shape. And then you run into the future and try to become that shape. And when I was 10, 11, 12, I began to dream of becoming a writer. And the rest of my life has been the real task of shaping myself to that boyhood thing. So fantasizing has been very creative for me. That you dreamt of becoming a magician when you were a child. I was a magician, but I was everything. I was into so many things. I was into architecture. I fell in love with World's Fairs when I was 12. The Chicago World's Fair opened that year. And my aunt was working in the streets of Paris there designing costumes. So I went down to the fair from my home in Waukegan, Illinois, quite often. But I'd begun to fall in love with architecture when I was eight by looking at the old science fiction. magazines. The great thing about growing up in science fiction is that you have an interest in everything. And so architecture was one of them, being a boy magician was another, becoming an actor. Did you meet Blackstone? Yes, I met Blackstone when I was ten years old. and ran up on the stage and helped him with several of his illusions, which made them work even better, of course. And I had a wonderful experience with Blackstone seven or eight years ago. I've raised all four of my daughters each evening on a time we call Blackstone time. And starting when they're two or three years old, I tell them my adventures with Blackstone as a child, all over the world and Egypt, ancient Egypt, going back in time, what have you. So the name Blackstone is part of their life. And... about seven, eight years ago, I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard with three of my daughters, and I stopped in front of this magic store and looked in. I said, oh my gosh, wait a minute, you know who's in there? And they said, who? I said, it's Blackstone. And they said, oh wow. So I said, wait out here. I'm going to go in and I'll introduce you. So I ran in the store, ran up to Blackstone. I said, Mr. Blackstone, you haven't seen me in 35 years, but I got my daughters out here and they know your name and all about you. And they think I know you better than I really do. Can I bring him in? He says, what's your first name? I said, Ray. He says, okay, bring him in. So I ran back out and got the daughters and brought them in. Blackstone did tricks for them and signed books and said, Ray, it's great to see you after all these years and all our adventures, you know. And we were all floating for a week after that. So this is the kind of life I lead with myself and with my kids. Somewhere in reading about you, Ray, I come across a story about a Mr. Electrico. Yes, he was a real man too. When I was 11 or 12, A carnival used to come through our town every Labor Day weekend for three or four days. And there was a man called Mr. Electrico who told me he was a defrocked Presbyterian minister, or so he said. And for some reason, maybe because I was a rabid magician or just a boy with open eyes and charming on some level or another, he sort of took me under his wing and we'd walk along the shore of Lake Michigan and talk. He would talk his little philosophies, and I'd talk my large ones. Why were yours large and his little? Well, boys always imagine that what they have to say is more important than anything said by an older person. You would discover later it's the reverse. But as a result of, he used to sit in an electric chair in the carnival every night, and they'd throw on 100 million volts of electricity, and his hair would stand up in a marvelous shock over his head. He looked very much like Ernest Thesiger, the English actor who played Dr. Pretoria. in The Bride of Frankenstein, that wonderful kind of face with the terrific nose. And as a result of his impact on my life with his magic show, I have put him in one of my books under that name, under his real name, Mr. Electrico, in Something Wicked This Way Comes, a novel of mine I published eight or nine years ago. So he's one of the few rare real people in my books. Does that recall he told you that you had met before? Yes. In another life. That's true. He told me that we had met on the... the battlefield of the Argonne Forest in France toward the end of, or in the middle of, World War I, in that I had died in his arms, and now here I was reincarnated under the name Ray Bradbury. You were born after World War I, too. Yes, I was born two years after. Yes. And so I was impressed with that. Anyone tells me that I'm the reincarnation of someone, I was very impressed when I was 12. You said that you had this fantasy of wanting to be a writer and that you became a writer. Why so early did you think you wanted to become a writer? Was this, again, your interest in science fiction at a very early age? Science fiction and fantasy I began, my aunt and my mother read to me when I was three from all the old... Grimm fairy tales, Anderson fairy tales, and then all the Oz books as I was growing up, and then Edgar Allan Poe when I was eight. So by the time I was 10 or 11, I was just full to the brim with these, and the Greek myths and the Roman myths, and then of course I went to Sunday school, and you take in the Christian myths, which are all fascinating in their own way, and I I guess I've always tended to be a visual person, and myths are very visual. And I began to draw, and then I felt the urge to carry on these myths. And if I'm anything at all, I'm not really a science fiction writer. I'm a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology. And my stories are easy to remember because I was influenced at an early age by the real tellers of tales of all history. When you start out 2,000 years ago, come up through time and learn all the myths, then you become a good storyteller. It's in your blood then by the time you start to write. I'm glad for that background. You moved, the family moved from Illinois, I gather, to Los Angeles because you did attend high school here in Los Angeles. But I've also seen a reference to your reading comics. on a radio station in Tucson, so you must have come by way of Tucson. We lived in Tucson for a year when I was six and for a year when I was 12. To show you what kind of a brassy little boy I was, always knowing what he wanted to do, I fell in love with radio, of course, along the way, too. I've had so many loves in all the arts, thank God, including movies. But when I arrived in Tucson, I was doing a lot of little theater work in the seventh grade and got the opportunity to do a lot of things. the lead in a play and then based on that I said to my friends, oh heck, I'm going to go into radio. I love radio and I'm going to get me a job there and three weeks from tonight you're going to hear me on radio. Well, I didn't know anyone at the local radio station, but I went down and hung around the station and emptied the ashtrays and ran out for cigarettes and bought magazines for people when they ordered me to do so and I got underfoot. And after a while I was not only underfoot, but I wound up reading the comics to the kiddies every Saturday night on that station three weeks So I discovered early on if you wanted a thing, you went for it and you got it. And most people don't do that. People don't ever go anywhere or want anything, so they never get anything. Did you come from a family of rather modest circumstances? I saw a reference to your folks being on relief when you lived here in Los Angeles. Yes. Living in a tenement. I lived in a tenement later. We were on relief, though, the year I graduated from L.A. High School, getting food from the government. My dad was out of work for the better part of a year or so. And so I... I had graduated from L.A. High School wearing the suit of an uncle who had been murdered in the suit. There was a bullet hole through the front and out the back of it. He'd been shot in a holdup, and we had no money to buy a graduation suit for me. So I put on my uncle's suit that he'd been killed in and wore it to graduation. We didn't even have enough money to repair the bullet hole. So we were indeed from a very modest background at that time in our life, and then later things improved, of course. Yes. You didn't go to college. Never went to college. Don't believe in college for writers. I think it's very dangerous. I think too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual. The intellect is a great danger to creativity. The intellect is a danger to creativity? Terrible danger because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth, who you are, what you are, what you want to be. And I've had a sign over my typewriter for 20... years now, which reads, don't think. You must never think at the typewriter. You must feel. And then your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data. You do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter. But at the typewriter, you should be living. It should be a living experience, just as when I'm here with you, speaking to you, you're popping all sorts of questions at me. I don't have time to think about them. I can react to them. I try to say things that are meaningful in a reaction. to them. If I stopped and thought too long, both of us fall asleep. And that can happen at the typewriter too. And the worst thing you do when you think is lie. You can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did. And what you're trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself. Find out who you really are and try not to lie. Try to tell the truth all the time. And the only way to do this is by being very active and very emotional and get it out of yourself. and making lists of things that you hate and things that you love. And you write about these then intensely. And when it's over, then you can think about it. Then you can look at it and say, well, it works or it doesn't work. Something's missing here. And then if something is missing, you go back and re-emotionalize that so it's all of a piece. But thinking is to be a corrective in our life. It's not supposed to be the center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life. Being is supposed to be the center with correctives around which hold us. like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not our way of life. The way of our living is the blood pumping through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know. And the intellect doesn't really help you very much there. You should get on with the business of living. You rely heavily upon intuition? Oh, completely. Everything of mine is intuitive. All the poetry I've written, I couldn't possibly tell you how I did it. I don't know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of this sort of thing. It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that I loved. Feeling, again, I love Shakespeare. I don't intellectualize about him. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins. I don't intellectualize about him. I love Dylan Thomas. I don't know what in the hell he's writing about half the time, but he sounds good. He rings well. I'll give you an example of this sort of thing. I walked into my living room, oh, 20 years ago. ago when one of my daughters was about four years old and a Dylan Thomas record was on the set. And I thought that my daughter, that my wife had put the record on. Come to find out my four-year-old had put on his record and I came into the room. She pointed to the record and said, he knows what he's doing. Now that's great. That's, that's, see, that's not intellectualizing. It's an emotional reaction. So if there is no feeling, there cannot be great art. Just, if there's any, if the If the feeling is missing, just forget it. You'll never make it as an artist. Ray, you've said that the greatest teacher in the greatest school you ever had was Charles Lawton, who taught you, who helped you rediscover Shakespeare and Shaw. He certainly was one of my... He was the best male teacher I had, my best female teacher, was a wonderful lady in L.A. High School, Jeanette Johnson, who is still alive and around 83 years old, living out in Claremont. And Charlie Lawton, on the other hand... again emotionally. He taught me by simply standing on his own two feet, on his hearth, in his home, and giving me the opening scenes of Richard III and Hamlet and Othello, and reminding me again of what language can do in the theater. Again, feeling. The feeling of the language. The love of this which rolled out of the man, his passion for Shakespeare, not intellectualizing. So he then taught me to go back to my own place and dare to feel and dare to speak in tongues. and use the language again and hope that people will stay with you and not worry about the plot because you don't go to hamlet to find out who in hell murdered hamlet's father that's not what it's about what it's about is listening to the asides everything in art is an aside all the great novels the reason you go to read them is not the plot it's for the philosophical asides to find out who ernest hemingway is or who steinbeck is or who faulkner is you or you name your own novelist or poet, but it's always an aside having nothing to do with the main drive. When you say who they are, elsewhere you've written that the character of the story is a kind of medium in a seance with the author and that other self inside the author. The process of writing then is a process, as you said earlier, of self-discovery of the hidden parts. Yeah, the typewriter should be in a Ouija board. and your hands move on it and reveal things about yourself you don't know. For instance, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, my character Montag is myself discovering me. Really, there are those sides of our character which are destructive, and you bring them out of the open, and then you find ways of becoming creative. So the character of Montag is a totalitarian who discovers he's burning not just books but ideas. And then he sets out in search of rediscovering himself and discovering how to read and how to be alive through reading. And then he gives up his profession and becomes a destroyer of the destroyers and comes out on the right side of the situation. You've referred to yourself as a child of the libraries. Yes, indeed. I use the library the same way I've been describing the creative process to you. As a writer, I don't go in with lists of things to read. I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately. And if I don't fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book and fall in love with it. You can only go with loves in this life. What about reading lists? They can't help you most of the time. You've got to prowl around everywhere. And people don't have any fun because they don't ever go over in the children's section. But I go over in the children's section all the time. I try to keep up on what's being done in every field. And most children's books are ten times more enjoyable than the average American novel right now. So I looked on the shelves of the children's libraries years ago, and I said, I want a lean, cheek-by-jowl, shoulder-to-shoulder with my real heroes, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe. And as a result of this kind of emotional thing and rejecting, All the modern American novelists, most of them the last 20 years, I have become a father to a lot of children, and these books are indeed leaning against the shoulders of good old Charlie Dickens and Mark Twain. You haven't mentioned Edgar Rice Burroughs, and you've referred to him as one of your fathers. Yes, indeed he was. When I was 10, fell completely under the spell of Tarzan and John Carter, Warlord of Mars. These are not on any reading lists anywhere in the world. They are reviled and detested by all of the teachers and all the librarians. Most of the libraries don't even carry his books. And yet without Tarzan and without Mr. Burroughs writing about John Carter, warlord of Mars, I would never have grown to be 12 feet tall and taken off from Mars myself. This is the emotional thing, you see. You must galvanize people so they want to be completely alive and live forever or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art then, and survival through emotion, no matter what happens. Even though the world can try to crush you and put you down with facts, you break up through the concrete and say, damn it all, I'm a blade of grass and I will survive. But you survive with people like Mr. Burroughs, first of all. You began writing about space travel before there was space travel. Now there is. Right. What is space travel going to do for man? Space travel is going to enable us to live forever. That's its most important function. Yes, we wish to guard the gift of life. Kazantzakis puts it very well in his most remarkable book, which no one has read. Very few people have read it. The Saviors of... God, and in the book he says, God cries out to be saved. We go to save him. That's what space travel is all about. In this part of the universe, God has wakened on this planet and shaped himself the way we are shaped. We are the flesh of the universe which wishes to know itself. That's great. That's responsible. That's beautiful. It's a very nice concept of religion, one I'm very comfortable with. I like to think of myself as part of the universe waking up. and looking around saying, hey, this is remarkable, look at this, I have all these senses, I'd like to keep this gift going. You find no conflict between religion and science then? Absolutely none. The processes they're going through are the two halves of a coin, because everything ends in mystery. I mean, the scientists have theories, and the theologians have myths, and they're both the same thing, because we end up in ignorance. We don't know what gravity is, we have theories about light, but they're only theories. which are being revised. Even Mr. Einstein is coming under scrutiny again in the last few years with some of his theories. These will be revised and changed in the next 100 years and again 100,000 years from now. The important thing is we should gather as much data as we can, as many facts as we need, and on these base our theories, which help us to survive. And where the mystery begins, theology takes over. It's two halves of the same coin. We have to... Think about the unthinkable, which is what religion does and science does too at times, trying to figure out what in heck's going on. How did we get here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? We don't have the answers, and we never will have them. So we make do with theory and with theology. And with the two of them as tools, one to work with the basic facts, one to take up where the mystery begins, we'll make do and go on into the future and live for three billion years in space, not just here. but on on out to the stars that's what space travel is all about would you like to see life extended forever your own life for example if i could stay in good health and if i would not become senile and if i could revivify myself as i've done a poem my new book of poetry which cries out to the universe and says give me a shake knock the knock the soot off my chimney. Because living, we accumulate so much knowledge in ourselves, we cake ourselves inside with improper knowledge at times. And what we want to do at times is just bang our head. We know so much that's not true. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And just the accumulation of what we would call sin or knowledge of sin in others. And if you could give that a knock every 40 years and dislodge the soot in your soul. cleanse yourself completely so that you wouldn't be burdened with knowledge. You'd keep all the knowledge you really need and go on for another 100 years or 200 years. That kind of life I'd want. But I wouldn't want to have such knowledge as would make me paranoid or drive me crazy at a later age. And that's one of the problems of old age is that you have senile paranoia and similar things, which we don't want to have visited upon us. So I would take the gift of age. If you would give me health and a truly clean mind with it. Ray, you don't drive an automobile. Not yet. And you don't fly. Not yet. Why? I'm a born coward and also I know I would be a murderer behind the wheel of a car, which is more than most people seem to know. We men are especially horrible at this. The average male is the most dangerous driver on our roads and kills most of the people in our society every year. Generally age 21, as you can gauge by the insurance rates, and I think I would be a dangerous murdering fiend on the road. And at least I have enough sense to know this and stay away from the devices. I think I'd kill someone the second day out, run over them, and then back up and run over them again. What about flying? Flying is a matter of height. It took me three days to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower with my kids a few years ago. They had to bully me into it. going up to the third level. I just don't much like heights. And neither of these seem to interfere with your work. Not at all. And you give a very strong impression you love your work. Oh, intensely. I wouldn't be in it. If I ever stop loving it, I'll shift it and go over into something else. And I have so many loves, though. Do you think this is important for all of us, to work in something that gives us this kind of deep satisfaction, what you describe as love? Yeah, I don't think life is worth living. Unless you're doing something you love completely, so that you get out of bed in the morning and want to rush to do it. If you're doing something mediocre, if you're doing something... ...to fill in time. Life really isn't worth living and I recommend suicide. I can't understand people not living at the top of their emotions constantly, living with their enthusiasms, living with some sense of joy, some sense of creativity. I don't care on how small a level it is. If you're a mathematician and love figures... great, you know. I don't understand that. I've never been any good at figures. But if you love it and you tell me you love it, boy are you lucky. I don't care what field it is though. And there's got to be a field for everyone, doesn't there? Even raising children, which is not supposed to be in these days, huh? But why can't one love that, huh? Why can't one love that? Are you fearful of being put out of work in writing about fantasies of space as reality overtakes fantasy? No, it's going to take about 3 billion or 4 billion years for them to catch up, because we've only been on the moon for a few hours. out of the last five billion years. So they haven't caught up at all. And the basic problems of science fiction have always been philosophical ones. Plato wrote the first science fiction works, among the first. anyway, with the Republic. The Republic is an examination of a possible future democracy and the problems of humanity and how do you put together a society that works. Anytime you postulate a theory of that sort, you're writing science fiction. So all of philosophy falls into our domain when we're thinking about humankind and how to better ourselves, how to survive, what to do with our machines, how to build our cities. And we're just beginning to understand human character so as to construct better cities and better places for ourselves to raise our children. Some of your stories seem almost to be a protest against the overwhelming mediocrity of life. And yet I've seen you defend mediocrity, defend the junk of life as part of its joy. Yes, I think we have to have every kind of knowledge there is. In order to become excellent, you first have to have the knowledge. have to be mediocre, which only means medium anyway. A lot of people use it very pejoratively, thinking that it means poor. It doesn't mean poor at all. It just means medium. But I believe in raising children with all these fabulous junks, because I was raised on them. I found they were good food, and they helped me to grow. It's like putting blood manure on roses. You have to have a little of everything. You can't appreciate Shakespeare until you've read Edgar Rice Burroughs, first of all. and you need both of them in your life. I spend my evenings wildly changing styles from reading Shakespeare at the start of the evening and reading James Bond at the end of it. There's room in your head for all this. It's not going to contaminate you. It's not going to corrupt you. And it gives you then such a complete education that your subconscious doesn't, you don't have to stop and think and prevent your subconscious from moving when you're writing because you have all these styles within you. Thank you very much, Ray.

Showing them again is CUNY TV's tribute to Jim and his contributions to public television. Ray Bradbury's publishers refer to him simply as the world's greatest living science fiction writer. Some might take exception to the description, but only to argue that what he writes is not science fiction. but fantasy.

Stories that tell us little about science, but a great deal about the netherworld of imagination buried deep in all of us. In addition to more than a thousand short stories, several novels, and a handful of plays, Ray Bradbury has written poetry and scenarios. He adapted the novel, Moby Dick, for the movies, and has seen several of his own stories made into motion pictures, among them Fahrenheit 451. His writing has appeared in virtually every American magazine publishing quality fiction and in over a hundred anthologies of short stories.

Ray, I'd like to put myself first on the side of those who regard your writing as fantasy rather than science fiction. you a question about fantasy. I suppose that like myself you grew up believing that to fantasize was the same as to daydream, to be idle, to be a kind of a ne'er-do-well. And yet I know that you don't look upon fantasy as a fantasy.

fantasizing as something that's evil? No, and it's a shame that this concept ever got going with any people at all, because I've always claimed that the ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow. Boys and girls at the age of 10, 11, 12, 13, right on up through the most important time of their day, or especially at night before going to sleep, is dreaming themselves into becoming something, into being something.

So when you're a child, you begin to dream yourself into a shape. And then you run into the future and try to become that shape. And when I was 10, 11, 12, I began to dream of becoming a writer.

And the rest of my life has been the real task of shaping myself to that boyhood thing. So fantasizing has been very creative for me. That you dreamt of becoming a magician when you were a child. I was a magician, but I was everything.

I was into so many things. I was into architecture. I fell in love with World's Fairs when I was 12. The Chicago World's Fair opened that year.

And my aunt was working in the streets of Paris there designing costumes. So I went down to the fair from my home in Waukegan, Illinois, quite often. But I'd begun to fall in love with architecture when I was eight by looking at the old science fiction. magazines.

The great thing about growing up in science fiction is that you have an interest in everything. And so architecture was one of them, being a boy magician was another, becoming an actor. Did you meet Blackstone? Yes, I met Blackstone when I was ten years old. and ran up on the stage and helped him with several of his illusions, which made them work even better, of course.

And I had a wonderful experience with Blackstone seven or eight years ago. I've raised all four of my daughters each evening on a time we call Blackstone time. And starting when they're two or three years old, I tell them my adventures with Blackstone as a child, all over the world and Egypt, ancient Egypt, going back in time, what have you. So the name Blackstone is part of their life.

And... about seven, eight years ago, I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard with three of my daughters, and I stopped in front of this magic store and looked in. I said, oh my gosh, wait a minute, you know who's in there? And they said, who? I said, it's Blackstone.

And they said, oh wow. So I said, wait out here. I'm going to go in and I'll introduce you.

So I ran in the store, ran up to Blackstone. I said, Mr. Blackstone, you haven't seen me in 35 years, but I got my daughters out here and they know your name and all about you. And they think I know you better than I really do. Can I bring him in? He says, what's your first name?

I said, Ray. He says, okay, bring him in. So I ran back out and got the daughters and brought them in. Blackstone did tricks for them and signed books and said, Ray, it's great to see you after all these years and all our adventures, you know. And we were all floating for a week after that.

So this is the kind of life I lead with myself and with my kids. Somewhere in reading about you, Ray, I come across a story about a Mr. Electrico. Yes, he was a real man too. When I was 11 or 12, A carnival used to come through our town every Labor Day weekend for three or four days. And there was a man called Mr. Electrico who told me he was a defrocked Presbyterian minister, or so he said.

And for some reason, maybe because I was a rabid magician or just a boy with open eyes and charming on some level or another, he sort of took me under his wing and we'd walk along the shore of Lake Michigan and talk. He would talk his little philosophies, and I'd talk my large ones. Why were yours large and his little? Well, boys always imagine that what they have to say is more important than anything said by an older person. You would discover later it's the reverse.

But as a result of, he used to sit in an electric chair in the carnival every night, and they'd throw on 100 million volts of electricity, and his hair would stand up in a marvelous shock over his head. He looked very much like Ernest Thesiger, the English actor who played Dr. Pretoria. in The Bride of Frankenstein, that wonderful kind of face with the terrific nose. And as a result of his impact on my life with his magic show, I have put him in one of my books under that name, under his real name, Mr. Electrico, in Something Wicked This Way Comes, a novel of mine I published eight or nine years ago. So he's one of the few rare real people in my books.

Does that recall he told you that you had met before? Yes. In another life.

That's true. He told me that we had met on the... the battlefield of the Argonne Forest in France toward the end of, or in the middle of, World War I, in that I had died in his arms, and now here I was reincarnated under the name Ray Bradbury. You were born after World War I, too.

Yes, I was born two years after. Yes. And so I was impressed with that.

Anyone tells me that I'm the reincarnation of someone, I was very impressed when I was 12. You said that you had this fantasy of wanting to be a writer and that you became a writer. Why so early did you think you wanted to become a writer? Was this, again, your interest in science fiction at a very early age?

Science fiction and fantasy I began, my aunt and my mother read to me when I was three from all the old... Grimm fairy tales, Anderson fairy tales, and then all the Oz books as I was growing up, and then Edgar Allan Poe when I was eight. So by the time I was 10 or 11, I was just full to the brim with these, and the Greek myths and the Roman myths, and then of course I went to Sunday school, and you take in the Christian myths, which are all fascinating in their own way, and I I guess I've always tended to be a visual person, and myths are very visual.

And I began to draw, and then I felt the urge to carry on these myths. And if I'm anything at all, I'm not really a science fiction writer. I'm a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology.

And my stories are easy to remember because I was influenced at an early age by the real tellers of tales of all history. When you start out 2,000 years ago, come up through time and learn all the myths, then you become a good storyteller. It's in your blood then by the time you start to write.

I'm glad for that background. You moved, the family moved from Illinois, I gather, to Los Angeles because you did attend high school here in Los Angeles. But I've also seen a reference to your reading comics. on a radio station in Tucson, so you must have come by way of Tucson. We lived in Tucson for a year when I was six and for a year when I was 12. To show you what kind of a brassy little boy I was, always knowing what he wanted to do, I fell in love with radio, of course, along the way, too.

I've had so many loves in all the arts, thank God, including movies. But when I arrived in Tucson, I was doing a lot of little theater work in the seventh grade and got the opportunity to do a lot of things. the lead in a play and then based on that I said to my friends, oh heck, I'm going to go into radio. I love radio and I'm going to get me a job there and three weeks from tonight you're going to hear me on radio.

Well, I didn't know anyone at the local radio station, but I went down and hung around the station and emptied the ashtrays and ran out for cigarettes and bought magazines for people when they ordered me to do so and I got underfoot. And after a while I was not only underfoot, but I wound up reading the comics to the kiddies every Saturday night on that station three weeks So I discovered early on if you wanted a thing, you went for it and you got it. And most people don't do that.

People don't ever go anywhere or want anything, so they never get anything. Did you come from a family of rather modest circumstances? I saw a reference to your folks being on relief when you lived here in Los Angeles.

Yes. Living in a tenement. I lived in a tenement later. We were on relief, though, the year I graduated from L.A. High School, getting food from the government.

My dad was out of work for the better part of a year or so. And so I... I had graduated from L.A. High School wearing the suit of an uncle who had been murdered in the suit. There was a bullet hole through the front and out the back of it.

He'd been shot in a holdup, and we had no money to buy a graduation suit for me. So I put on my uncle's suit that he'd been killed in and wore it to graduation. We didn't even have enough money to repair the bullet hole.

So we were indeed from a very modest background at that time in our life, and then later things improved, of course. Yes. You didn't go to college. Never went to college. Don't believe in college for writers.

I think it's very dangerous. I think too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual. The intellect is a great danger to creativity.

The intellect is a danger to creativity? Terrible danger because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth, who you are, what you are, what you want to be. And I've had a sign over my typewriter for 20... years now, which reads, don't think. You must never think at the typewriter.

You must feel. And then your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data. You do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter.

But at the typewriter, you should be living. It should be a living experience, just as when I'm here with you, speaking to you, you're popping all sorts of questions at me. I don't have time to think about them. I can react to them.

I try to say things that are meaningful in a reaction. to them. If I stopped and thought too long, both of us fall asleep.

And that can happen at the typewriter too. And the worst thing you do when you think is lie. You can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did.

And what you're trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself. Find out who you really are and try not to lie. Try to tell the truth all the time.

And the only way to do this is by being very active and very emotional and get it out of yourself. and making lists of things that you hate and things that you love. And you write about these then intensely.

And when it's over, then you can think about it. Then you can look at it and say, well, it works or it doesn't work. Something's missing here.

And then if something is missing, you go back and re-emotionalize that so it's all of a piece. But thinking is to be a corrective in our life. It's not supposed to be the center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life.

Being is supposed to be the center with correctives around which hold us. like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not our way of life. The way of our living is the blood pumping through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know. And the intellect doesn't really help you very much there.

You should get on with the business of living. You rely heavily upon intuition? Oh, completely.

Everything of mine is intuitive. All the poetry I've written, I couldn't possibly tell you how I did it. I don't know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of this sort of thing. It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that I loved. Feeling, again, I love Shakespeare.

I don't intellectualize about him. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins. I don't intellectualize about him.

I love Dylan Thomas. I don't know what in the hell he's writing about half the time, but he sounds good. He rings well.

I'll give you an example of this sort of thing. I walked into my living room, oh, 20 years ago. ago when one of my daughters was about four years old and a Dylan Thomas record was on the set. And I thought that my daughter, that my wife had put the record on.

Come to find out my four-year-old had put on his record and I came into the room. She pointed to the record and said, he knows what he's doing. Now that's great. That's, that's, see, that's not intellectualizing.

It's an emotional reaction. So if there is no feeling, there cannot be great art. Just, if there's any, if the If the feeling is missing, just forget it. You'll never make it as an artist. Ray, you've said that the greatest teacher in the greatest school you ever had was Charles Lawton, who taught you, who helped you rediscover Shakespeare and Shaw.

He certainly was one of my... He was the best male teacher I had, my best female teacher, was a wonderful lady in L.A. High School, Jeanette Johnson, who is still alive and around 83 years old, living out in Claremont.

And Charlie Lawton, on the other hand... again emotionally. He taught me by simply standing on his own two feet, on his hearth, in his home, and giving me the opening scenes of Richard III and Hamlet and Othello, and reminding me again of what language can do in the theater.

Again, feeling. The feeling of the language. The love of this which rolled out of the man, his passion for Shakespeare, not intellectualizing.

So he then taught me to go back to my own place and dare to feel and dare to speak in tongues. and use the language again and hope that people will stay with you and not worry about the plot because you don't go to hamlet to find out who in hell murdered hamlet's father that's not what it's about what it's about is listening to the asides everything in art is an aside all the great novels the reason you go to read them is not the plot it's for the philosophical asides to find out who ernest hemingway is or who steinbeck is or who faulkner is you or you name your own novelist or poet, but it's always an aside having nothing to do with the main drive. When you say who they are, elsewhere you've written that the character of the story is a kind of medium in a seance with the author and that other self inside the author.

The process of writing then is a process, as you said earlier, of self-discovery of the hidden parts. Yeah, the typewriter should be in a Ouija board. and your hands move on it and reveal things about yourself you don't know. For instance, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, my character Montag is myself discovering me.

Really, there are those sides of our character which are destructive, and you bring them out of the open, and then you find ways of becoming creative. So the character of Montag is a totalitarian who discovers he's burning not just books but ideas. And then he sets out in search of rediscovering himself and discovering how to read and how to be alive through reading.

And then he gives up his profession and becomes a destroyer of the destroyers and comes out on the right side of the situation. You've referred to yourself as a child of the libraries. Yes, indeed.

I use the library the same way I've been describing the creative process to you. As a writer, I don't go in with lists of things to read. I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately.

And if I don't fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book and fall in love with it. You can only go with loves in this life. What about reading lists?

They can't help you most of the time. You've got to prowl around everywhere. And people don't have any fun because they don't ever go over in the children's section.

But I go over in the children's section all the time. I try to keep up on what's being done in every field. And most children's books are ten times more enjoyable than the average American novel right now.

So I looked on the shelves of the children's libraries years ago, and I said, I want a lean, cheek-by-jowl, shoulder-to-shoulder with my real heroes, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe. And as a result of this kind of emotional thing and rejecting, All the modern American novelists, most of them the last 20 years, I have become a father to a lot of children, and these books are indeed leaning against the shoulders of good old Charlie Dickens and Mark Twain. You haven't mentioned Edgar Rice Burroughs, and you've referred to him as one of your fathers.

Yes, indeed he was. When I was 10, fell completely under the spell of Tarzan and John Carter, Warlord of Mars. These are not on any reading lists anywhere in the world.

They are reviled and detested by all of the teachers and all the librarians. Most of the libraries don't even carry his books. And yet without Tarzan and without Mr. Burroughs writing about John Carter, warlord of Mars, I would never have grown to be 12 feet tall and taken off from Mars myself.

This is the emotional thing, you see. You must galvanize people so they want to be completely alive and live forever or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art then, and survival through emotion, no matter what happens.

Even though the world can try to crush you and put you down with facts, you break up through the concrete and say, damn it all, I'm a blade of grass and I will survive. But you survive with people like Mr. Burroughs, first of all. You began writing about space travel before there was space travel. Now there is.

Right. What is space travel going to do for man? Space travel is going to enable us to live forever.

That's its most important function. Yes, we wish to guard the gift of life. Kazantzakis puts it very well in his most remarkable book, which no one has read. Very few people have read it.

The Saviors of... God, and in the book he says, God cries out to be saved. We go to save him.

That's what space travel is all about. In this part of the universe, God has wakened on this planet and shaped himself the way we are shaped. We are the flesh of the universe which wishes to know itself.

That's great. That's responsible. That's beautiful.

It's a very nice concept of religion, one I'm very comfortable with. I like to think of myself as part of the universe waking up. and looking around saying, hey, this is remarkable, look at this, I have all these senses, I'd like to keep this gift going. You find no conflict between religion and science then?

Absolutely none. The processes they're going through are the two halves of a coin, because everything ends in mystery. I mean, the scientists have theories, and the theologians have myths, and they're both the same thing, because we end up in ignorance. We don't know what gravity is, we have theories about light, but they're only theories.

which are being revised. Even Mr. Einstein is coming under scrutiny again in the last few years with some of his theories. These will be revised and changed in the next 100 years and again 100,000 years from now.

The important thing is we should gather as much data as we can, as many facts as we need, and on these base our theories, which help us to survive. And where the mystery begins, theology takes over. It's two halves of the same coin. We have to... Think about the unthinkable, which is what religion does and science does too at times, trying to figure out what in heck's going on.

How did we get here? Where did we come from? Where are we going?

We don't have the answers, and we never will have them. So we make do with theory and with theology. And with the two of them as tools, one to work with the basic facts, one to take up where the mystery begins, we'll make do and go on into the future and live for three billion years in space, not just here. but on on out to the stars that's what space travel is all about would you like to see life extended forever your own life for example if i could stay in good health and if i would not become senile and if i could revivify myself as i've done a poem my new book of poetry which cries out to the universe and says give me a shake knock the knock the soot off my chimney.

Because living, we accumulate so much knowledge in ourselves, we cake ourselves inside with improper knowledge at times. And what we want to do at times is just bang our head. We know so much that's not true.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And just the accumulation of what we would call sin or knowledge of sin in others. And if you could give that a knock every 40 years and dislodge the soot in your soul. cleanse yourself completely so that you wouldn't be burdened with knowledge. You'd keep all the knowledge you really need and go on for another 100 years or 200 years.

That kind of life I'd want. But I wouldn't want to have such knowledge as would make me paranoid or drive me crazy at a later age. And that's one of the problems of old age is that you have senile paranoia and similar things, which we don't want to have visited upon us.

So I would take the gift of age. If you would give me health and a truly clean mind with it. Ray, you don't drive an automobile. Not yet. And you don't fly.

Not yet. Why? I'm a born coward and also I know I would be a murderer behind the wheel of a car, which is more than most people seem to know. We men are especially horrible at this.

The average male is the most dangerous driver on our roads and kills most of the people in our society every year. Generally age 21, as you can gauge by the insurance rates, and I think I would be a dangerous murdering fiend on the road. And at least I have enough sense to know this and stay away from the devices. I think I'd kill someone the second day out, run over them, and then back up and run over them again. What about flying?

Flying is a matter of height. It took me three days to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower with my kids a few years ago. They had to bully me into it.

going up to the third level. I just don't much like heights. And neither of these seem to interfere with your work.

Not at all. And you give a very strong impression you love your work. Oh, intensely.

I wouldn't be in it. If I ever stop loving it, I'll shift it and go over into something else. And I have so many loves, though.

Do you think this is important for all of us, to work in something that gives us this kind of deep satisfaction, what you describe as love? Yeah, I don't think life is worth living. Unless you're doing something you love completely, so that you get out of bed in the morning and want to rush to do it. If you're doing something mediocre, if you're doing something...

...to fill in time. Life really isn't worth living and I recommend suicide. I can't understand people not living at the top of their emotions constantly, living with their enthusiasms, living with some sense of joy, some sense of creativity. I don't care on how small a level it is.

If you're a mathematician and love figures... great, you know. I don't understand that. I've never been any good at figures.

But if you love it and you tell me you love it, boy are you lucky. I don't care what field it is though. And there's got to be a field for everyone, doesn't there?

Even raising children, which is not supposed to be in these days, huh? But why can't one love that, huh? Why can't one love that? Are you fearful of being put out of work in writing about fantasies of space as reality overtakes fantasy? No, it's going to take about 3 billion or 4 billion years for them to catch up, because we've only been on the moon for a few hours.

out of the last five billion years. So they haven't caught up at all. And the basic problems of science fiction have always been philosophical ones.

Plato wrote the first science fiction works, among the first. anyway, with the Republic. The Republic is an examination of a possible future democracy and the problems of humanity and how do you put together a society that works. Anytime you postulate a theory of that sort, you're writing science fiction. So all of philosophy falls into our domain when we're thinking about humankind and how to better ourselves, how to survive, what to do with our machines, how to build our cities.

And we're just beginning to understand human character so as to construct better cities and better places for ourselves to raise our children. Some of your stories seem almost to be a protest against the overwhelming mediocrity of life. And yet I've seen you defend mediocrity, defend the junk of life as part of its joy.

Yes, I think we have to have every kind of knowledge there is. In order to become excellent, you first have to have the knowledge. have to be mediocre, which only means medium anyway.

A lot of people use it very pejoratively, thinking that it means poor. It doesn't mean poor at all. It just means medium. But I believe in raising children with all these fabulous junks, because I was raised on them.

I found they were good food, and they helped me to grow. It's like putting blood manure on roses. You have to have a little of everything. You can't appreciate Shakespeare until you've read Edgar Rice Burroughs, first of all. and you need both of them in your life.

I spend my evenings wildly changing styles from reading Shakespeare at the start of the evening and reading James Bond at the end of it. There's room in your head for all this. It's not going to contaminate you.

It's not going to corrupt you. And it gives you then such a complete education that your subconscious doesn't, you don't have to stop and think and prevent your subconscious from moving when you're writing because you have all these styles within you. Thank you very much, Ray.

Transcript for:Exploring Ray Bradbury's Creative Philosophy

Transcript for:
Exploring Ray Bradbury's Creative Philosophy