I was looking for a passage from one of his short stories. An American couple is traveling in Mexico after an unspecified disaster has struck the US, and one of the men they meet explains that when he was young and stupid and lived in the city, he read the papers every day and went wild with anger. Today he lives in the country, and only reads newspapers that are 2 weeks old, and now is amused at the stupidity on display rather than impotently furious. I've remembered the gist of the passage, but not the wording, and goodreads has 82 pages of quotes from him. A few:
"Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all." - "Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher." - "You can’t learn to write in college." - "They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves."
1 comment:
Bradbury also explored these themes in "Usher II", first published in 1950, and later included in "The Martian Chronicles", which is perhaps the finest anthology of thematically connected short fiction ever published.
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