Ray Bradbury wrote the fuller sentence in “The Queen's Own Evaders, an Afterword.” Quote Investigator traces the essay dated 1962 to The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics (1963), and its later reprinting.
“Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art” — Attributed to Ray Bradbury; specific source transcribed by Quote Investigator, original not independently inspected.
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Provenance
The source
Essay
“The Queen's Own Evaders, an Afterword”
Dated and published
Essay dated July 31, 1962; in The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics (1963), p. 154
Later collection
Part reprinted in Zen in the Art of Writing (1990)
The identified source is a twentieth-century work published after 1930. Only the short searched sentence is excerpted.
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Context
Why it mattered
The essay grew out of Bradbury's work in Ireland on the Moby Dick screenplay. The specialist source trail ↗ places this warning in a discussion of making art without trying to explain it at the same time, then follows its later reprinting.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, but also wrote about the practical pleasure of writing. In Zen in the Art of Writing, he collected essays urging writers to trust enthusiasm and keep working.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
Bradbury, Ray. “The Queen's Own Evaders, an Afterword.” In The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics, 154. New York: Dial Press, 1963. Essay dated July 31, 1962. Wording checked through Quote Investigator.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art’?” Last verified 9 Nov 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/self-consciousness-is-the-enemy-of-all-art/