INTERVIEWER: How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?

BRADBURY: I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference? 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.

What ends up happening in the world, on a very, very large level, has a lot to do with what people believe will happen. Because these things are self-fulfilling — when enough people start to believe in a certain future outcome, their subconscious ends up acting on their behaviors, and that outcome ends up kind of happening. And so I think it’s so important to put forth beautiful, and also believable, visions of how things can be in the future, because then many people will believe in these things, and then those things will begin to come true.

And, conversely, this is why it’s so dangerous to do this kind of fear-mongering, cynical hopelessness you see every time you turn on the cable news or open up a newspaper — because if people are exposed to that enough, that’s what they will believe the future is going to be like, and they’ll start to act accordingly, and that’s what we’ll get.