Ray Bradbury on Storytelling, Friendship, and Why He Never Learned to Drive: A Lost Vintage Interview, Found and Animated

In the fall of 2012, Lisa Potts discovered a cassette tape behind her dresser. On it was a long-lost interview she had conducted with Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920–June 5, 2012) — regimented writer, creative idealist, list-maker, space-lover, sage of life and love — exactly four decades earlier, when she was a journalism student in 1972. Potts and her classmate Chadd Coates were driving Bradbury — a resolute, lifelong nondriver — from his home in West Los Angeles to their university, Orange County’s Chapman College, where he was about to deliver a lecture. The informal conversation that ensued emanates Bradbury’s unforgettable blend of humor, humility, and wholeheartedness to the point of heroism.

In this wonderful animation, the fine folks of Blank on Blank — who have previously given us John Lennon and Yoko Ono on love, David Foster Wallace on ambition, Jane Goodall on life, and Richard Feynman on the most important thing — bring to life Potts’s lost-and-found Bradbury treasure. Transcribed highlights below — please enjoy:

Half a century before David Whyte’s beautiful meditation on friendship as the ultimate gift of bearing witness, Bradbury tackles the subject with his singular blend of warm wisdom and wit:

That’s what friends are — people who share your crazy outlook and protect you from the world… Friendship is an island you retreat to, and you’re all on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies who don’t have enough brains to have your good taste.

Shortly after Margaret Mead and James Baldwin condemned car-culture, Bradbury explains on why he never learned to drive — even though he spent his life in LA, one of the world’s most freeway-raptured cities:

I’ve had too many friends killed now. I’ve seen too many people killed in my life, when I drove across the country when I was twelve — I’m sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude… It’s stupid — the whole activity is stupid.

Half a century after Bertrand Russell cautioned that “the kind of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for the human spirit,” Bradbury reflects on his realistic yet imaginative approach to storytelling:

It’s a combination of realism, with fantasy — but I don’t like realism, because we already know the real facts about life, most of the basic facts. I’m not interested in repeating what we already know — we know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war — all these things — by the time we’re eighteen… From there on, we need interpreters — we need poets, we need philosophers, we need theologians — who take the same basic facts and work with them, and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough — it’s interpretation.

Bradbury, who spent a lifetime advocating for the supremacy of emotion over the intellect in catalyzing creative work, echoes Rilke’s conviction that feedback poisons art and champions the practice of unselfconscious authenticity:

Don’t pay any attention to what anyone else says — no opinions! The important thing is to explode with the story, to emotionalize it, not to think it. If you start to think it, the story’s going to die on its feet. It’s like anything else… People who take books on sex to bed become frigid — you get self-conscious. You can’t think a story — you can’t think, “I shall do a story to improve mankind.” It’s nonsense! All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether you love a girl, or whether you love a boy, forget it — you don’t! A story is the same way — you either feel a story and need to write it, or you’d better not write it. […] You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. And then your public reads you and it begins to gather around… 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 never stopped — the joy stayed with him until he exploded out of this world shortly before his ninety-second birthday.

For more of Bradbury’s warm genius, see his wisdom on the importance of love in creative endeavors, the value of public libraries, and his conversation with Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke about Mars and the future of humanity.