J.G. Ballard on literary obsessions, motifs

INTERVIEWER: You seem to have an obsessive way of repeatedly playing out permutations of a certain set of emblems and concerns. Things like the winding down of time, car crashes, birds and flying, drained swimming pools, airports, abandoned buildings, Ronald Reagan . . . 

BALLARD ...I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession.

-- J.G. Ballard in the Paris Review interview 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Life, Thought and Work

Stories and Excerpts

• First stories from Collected Stories
• "The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World"
• "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"
• Excerpt from One Hundred Years of Solitude
• “Death Constant Beyond Love”
• The Autumn of the Patriarch (excerpt)

The New Yorker

• Personal History:  The Challenge:  A young writer proves himself.
• Richard Avedon's portrait of Gabriel García Márquez
• profile

The Modern Word (resources)

Nobel Prize.org

• Prize Speech
• Banquet Speech (in Spanish)

Interviews:

1. The Paris Review
2. Pete Hamill at Vanity Fair
3. Oprah
4. New York Times
5. The Atlantic:

• William Kennedy's long interview, "The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, and Other Visions":
• "Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County. Welcome to García Márquez' Macondo."
• Excerpt from same interview:  "The Origins of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Magic Realism":
• "Surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America."

Biographies, News and Appreciations:

1. FT.com: “[W]hat I like about you is the serious way you make up nonsense.”
2. Time: "And when he died on Thursday in his home in Mexico City, it did not seem impossible that a man could open his mouth and songbirds would fly out." 
3. Peter Carey
4. Edwidge Danticat
5. Edmund White
6. "Nobel author Gabriel García Márquez wins 17-year legal fight over murder classic: Colombian court rules against man who claimed author used his life story for main character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold."
7. Wikipedia
8. Mental Floss

Quotes:

• Policy Mic
• Buzz Feed

Ray Bradbury on the Writer's Obligation

"Edgar Rice Burroughs never would have looked upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it turns out—and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly—Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.... 

"By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special. That’s what we have to do for everyone, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten, Hey, life is fun!"

   -- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview

Is he right?  He is so persuasive and "optimal," I feel a deep desire to have some of his shine rub off on me.

Ray Bradbury on writing and politics

"Steinbeck is one of the few writers out of the thirties who’s still read, because he didn’t write for causes at all. He wrote human stories that happened to represent causes indirectly."

 -- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview

Ray Bradbury on Education

"It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we?"

  -- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview

Does he have a point?  He suggests people don't need math.  I'm not sure I agree, but maybe more emphasis on reading for pleasure?

Ray Bradbury on writing optimal behavior

"I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior.... You must live life at the top of your voice! 

"Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year."

 -- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

Ray Bradbury on Revision

"I go through and cut. Most short stories are too long. When I wrote the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, the first draft was a hundred and fifty thousand words. So I went through and cut out fifty thousand. It’s important to get out of your own way. Clean the kindling away, the rubbish. Make it clear."

 -- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

Ray Bradbury on politics

"You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things."

 -- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

Ray Bradbury on Story Ideas

"[I]n the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this.... [Make] lists of nouns and [ask], What does each noun mean? .... Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer.... Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. 

"[E]xamine [the] nouns.... [B]ring some characters on to talk about that noun and that place, and all of a sudden I had a story going. I used to do the same thing with photographs that I’d rip out of glossy magazines. I’d take the photographs and I’d write little prose poems about them."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

Ray Bradbury on the novel

"[T]he problem of the novel is to stay truthful.... [It] has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

Ray Bradbury on the short story

"The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview   

Ray Bradbury on tragedy

"If you’re not careful in tragedy, one extra rape, one extra incest, one extra murder and it’s hoo-haw time all of a sudden."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

Ray Bradbury on his popular use in schools

"Teachers [teach my books in school b]ecause I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview   

Ray Bradbury on literary influences

"Eudora Welty... has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say, How’d she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together? I was an intense student. Sometimes I’d get an old copy of [Thomas] Wolfe and cut out paragraphs and paste them in my story, because I couldn’t do it....  I’d retype whole sections of other people’s novels just to see how it felt coming out. Learn their rhythm. "

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

Ray Bradbury on style and truth

"Style is truth. Once you nail down what you want to say about yourself and your fears and your life, then that becomes your style and you go to those writers who can teach you how to use words to fit your truth."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview  

Ray Bradbury as an early writer and influences

"I imitated Edgar Allan Poe from the time I was twelve until I was about eighteen. I fell in love with the jewelry of Poe..... 

I listened to a lot of imaginative radio shows, especially one called Chandu the Magician... Every night when the show went off the air I sat down and, from memory, wrote out the whole script.... Chandu was against all the villains of the world and so was I. He responded to a psychic summons and so did I.... 

I was going into one of the arts... drawing, acting, and writing. "

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

Ray Bradbury on Ray Bradbury

"[M]y big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.... I’m a lot like Verne—a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo—who in a way is the flip side of Melville’s madman, Ahab—goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview

Ray Bradbury on SF writers reading SF

"I’ve always believed that you should do very little reading in your own field once you’re into it. But at the start it’s good to know what everyone’s doing."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

 Curious.  Other writers have said something similar.  I suspect Fred Pohl kept up with the field--often applauded for his ability to improve--but perhaps it stymies growth for some writers?

Ray Bradbury on Fahrenheit 451 (and SF taking an idea and turning it into a story)

You’re dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires.... and locked into [a great suspense story with a grand idea] is this great truth you want to tell, without pontificating....

Instead of looking into the face of truth, you [Perseus] look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa.  Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection... already in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricochet that enables you to have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and superintellectual. 

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview 

Ray Bradbury on Early SF writers

"When I was a young writer[,] if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer[,] you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.... We were all closet science-fiction writers."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview