“That’s the great secret of creativity,” Ray Bradbury famously proclaimed. “You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”

In 2008, The National Endowment for the Arts sat down with Bradbury to talk about his life, literary loves, and how he wrote Fahrenheit 451 for $9.80 by renting a typewriter in UCLA’s basement and using it as the only office he could afford. Particularly powerful is his passionate case for doing what you love, a fine complement to this recent omnibus of insights on finding your purpose.

Books are smart and brilliant and wise. Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.

Lone at night, when I was twelve years old, I looked at the planet Mars and I said, ‘Take me home!’ And the planet Mars took me home, and I never came back. So I’ve written every day in the last 75 years. I’ve never stopped writing.

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If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country — we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.”

There is, of course, a Venn diagram on precisely that. Wash it down with advice on how to do what you love from big thinkers like Paul Graham, Alain de Botton, and Steve Jobs.