Ray Bradbury Shares His Thoughts About Friendship, Fear, and Storytelling in an Animated 1972 Interview

In the most recent episode of the animated PBS series Blank on Blank, legendary author Ray Bradbury shares his thoughts about friendship, his fear of heights, and his absolute love of storytelling in an almost-lost 1972 interview with college students Lisa Potts and Chad Coates that took place as they were driving him to a lecture at Chapman College in Orange County, California.

If you can’t resist, if the typewriter is like candy to you, you train yourself for a lifetime. Every single day of your life, some wild new thing to be done. You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. Then your public reads you and it begins to gather around your selling a potato peeler in an alley, you know. The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I’ve written. When the joy stops, I’ll stop writing.

Bradbury-Theater

image via Blank on Blank

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.