Bradbury was never precious about the exact number. He picked a count he could clear before lunch and then refused to skip a day, for decades on end.

The Direct Answer
At least 1,000 words a day, nearly every day.
He traced the habit back to age twelve, when he got his first typewriter, a point he returns to in Zen in the Art of Writing.

A Thousand Words, Then Coffee

A thousand words is roughly four pages. Bradbury treated that as the floor, never the ceiling. He'd get up, run to the typewriter, and try to have the count done by morning. On good days he'd sail past it, sometimes to three thousand words or more, because the work had become something he ran toward rather than dragged himself through. The exact number mattered less to him than the unbroken chain of days. He started keeping it as a boy and never really stopped.

The output stacked up fast. By his own reckoning he wrote around three million words in the eight years between picking up the habit in earnest and his first professional sale at twenty. Most of that early work was rough and he knew it. Volume was the whole point. Quantity, he argued, was how a writer buys the experience that eventually turns into quality. You can't shortcut the bad pages. You write through them, a thousand at a time, until your hands learn something your head couldn't teach them.

There's a practical reason the floor sat at a thousand and not five thousand. A number that's too big invites failure, and failure invites quitting. Bradbury wanted a target he could hit on a tired day, a sick day, a distracted day, because the streak was the asset he was protecting. Four pages was enough to keep the chain alive and small enough that he almost never had a good excuse to break it. That's the quiet genius of the rule. It's sized to be kept.

Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Why Skipping a Day Scared Him

Bradbury described missing days in almost physical terms. Let one day slip and he felt uneasy. Two days and he was tense and short-tempered. Three days without writing and he half-believed he was losing his mind. The daily count wasn't a productivity hack for him. It was how he kept his footing and stayed himself. The page was a kind of nervous system, and skipping it threw the whole thing off.

That's why he framed the habit as joy rather than discipline. He didn't grind out a thousand words because a coach told him to. He did it because not doing it felt worse. The advice he gave younger writers leaned on that same idea. Make the writing something you can't wait to get back to, and the daily number takes care of itself. Force becomes momentum once the streak gets long enough to feel like part of you.

Late in life the rhythm shifted but the principle didn't. He kept writing in the mornings, kept reaching for ideas the moment he woke, and kept treating the page as the first appointment of the day rather than the last. The count was never about word-count vanity. It was about showing up early and often, on the theory that talent rewards attendance more than anyone likes to admit. To see how the rest of his day was built around it, read the full Ray Bradbury writing routine.

What You Can Steal