Ray Bradbury Quotes

I suppose it's an unconscious little stream of wit that flows quietly under everything I do or say.

There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.

I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.

They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, 'Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.

The Animal does not question lif. It lives. It's very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life.

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.

It was a simple thing. All terror is a simplicity. ("Interval In Sunlight")

I have two rules in life - to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done.

There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God's voice mingling among the crystal fires.

It learned you can't love anything too much in this world.

There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

I was a crazy creature with a head full of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my: fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't.

I have three rules to live by: Get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin, and when all else fails, run like hell.

When they reached her house all its lights were blazing.
What's going on? Montag had rarely seen that many house lights.
Oh, just my mother father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time--did I tell you?--for being a pedestrian. Oh, we're MOST peculiar.

I memorized all of "John Carter" and "Tarzan," and sat on my grandparents' front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, "Take me home!" I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.

In order to be creative, you don't have to be original.

A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it.

... and do you know what?"
"What?"
"People don't talk about anything."
"Oh, they must!"
"No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the caves they have the joke boxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the colored patterns running up and down, but it's only color and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That's all there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back sometimes pictures said things or even showed people.

I don't want to change sides and just be told what to do. There's no reason to change if I do that.

Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't die, that's what they say, can't die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmere who only whispers, and now they're coming and I'm nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be the one! If they live forever, why not me?

What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering, handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream...

Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.

It wasn't going places. It was being between ... Mostly it was space. So much space. I liked the idea of nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, and a lot of nothing in between, and me in the middle of the nothing.

The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway.

Whenever I am very happy or very sad or very embarrassed, I cram my mouth with sweets and litter the breezeway with discards.

Когда я очень счастлив, или очень огорчен, или смущен, я всегда набиваю рот сладостями и бросаю обертки где попало.

There was white in the flesh of his mouth and his cheeks and his hair was white and his eyes had faded, with white in the vague blueness there.

That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.

When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field.

In real life, as we know, the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to madness.

Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it's good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.) The reasons for writing about the day after tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that follow it, are as many and as varied as the people writing.

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

On page 86, "This wasn't like Jim. Always before, the window slid up, Jim's head popped out, ripe with yells, secret hissings, giggles, riots and rebel charges." This quote shows that something isn't right, that this isn't what Will was expecting of Jim. This quote can foreshadow of what could happen later in the book.

This is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted. There

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

Later in the morning Saul tried to die.

You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You're one of the few who put up with me. That's why I think it's so strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you, somehow.

Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and it's quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp.

men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells.

Most men jump at the chance to give up everything for nothing. There's nothing we're so slapstick with as our own immortal souls.

The Internet is a big distraction.

Sometimes you have intuitive insight about how you think things are going to be, and you write that. Other times you fantasize completely, which has nothing to do with predicting the future.

The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard, reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montage.
"You can't ever have my books," she said.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

This summer night deep down under the stars was all the things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.

He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.

My men are my references. They're waiting outside for the books. They're dangerous."
"Men like that always are.

I never thought of God as humorous," said Father Stone. "The Creator of the platypus, the camel, the ostrich, and man? Oh, come now!

We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks...And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me.

The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies. I'll show you my collection some day."
"Good."
"They want to know what I do with my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running. And sometimes, I tell them, I like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall in my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it?

Sandwich outdoors isn't a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.

Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don't you, Father Stone?

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.
He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts.
He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is
excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it.

Once you let yourself begin to be grown-up, you face a world full of problems you can't solve. The politicians and specialists - adults, all - have a hard enough time trying to figure out where to look. It doesn't have to be that way. The greatest solutions in society are reached by corporate thinking, ruled by a motive to either make a profit or go out of business.

When did it start, you ask, this job of ours (to burn book). There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.

A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head.

And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.

I'm not trying to PREDICT the future. I'm just trying to PREVENT it.

The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.

If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.

Fire the doubters out of your life.

The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.

Let us remain childlike and not childish in our 20-20 vision, borrowing such telescopes, rockets, or magic carpets as may be needed to hurry us along to miracles of physics as well as dream.

I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

The voice clock mourned out the cold hour of a cold morning of a still colder year.

The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it ... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane ... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck-tonight you could almost taste time.

I'll be darned!" said Douglas. "I never thought of that. That's brilliant! It's true. Old people never were children!"
"And it's kind of sad," said Tom, sitting still."There's nothing we can do to help them.

Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country.

No to write, for many of us, is to die.

Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day, every day, sleeping its life away.

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.

Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.

It doesn't matter if being so alive kills a man; it's better to have the quick fever every time.

You can't ever have my books.

At the very moment Mrs. Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wine-glasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun. (Season of Disbelief)

It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it's an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn't life a play? Don't I play it well?

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.

And there is only one way you can live, now. There must be an emotional hand to slap you on the back to make you move. A desire, a want, an emotion. Then the first thing you know you quiver and rise and strike your brow against silk-skinned wood. That emotion surges through you, calling you. If it is not strong enough, you will settle down wearily, and will not wake again. But if you grow with it, somehow, if you claw upward, if you work tediously, slowly, many days, you find ways of displacing earth an inch at a time, and one night you crumble the darkness, the exit is completed, and you wriggle forth to see the stars.

Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

I laugh until I weep And weep until I smile

And then, to the sound of death, the sound of the jets cutting the sky in two black pieces beyond the horizon, he would lie in the loft, hidden and safe, watching those strange new stars over the rim of the earth, fleeing from the soft color of dawn.

They want to know what I do with all my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running.

When I was a young man, I didn't think about having a family. My wife and I were too poor to have babies. Then all of a sudden, one came along and scared the hell out of us because we had no money. Once the baby arrives, you make do somehow. You fall in love with the baby and life adjusts itself. You find you don't need as much money as you thought. When that happens, you can ask the questions that should have come before the baby.

The girl? She was a time bomb.

Memories, as my father once said, are porcupines. To hell with them! Stay away from them! They make you unhappy. They ruin your work. They make you cry

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

BRADBURY: Well, if you love people you criticize them, and if you don't love them you don't criticize them, you let them go to hell, don't you? To help any kind of friendship, your marriage, your children, you criticize because you love. And this works the same way. With your friends
let's say in writing
if you don't offer criticism to them and scare them on occasion ... In other words you say to a new writer, for gods sake write, because if you don't you will disappear. The world doesn't give a damn about you unless you do something. Those are the rules; I didn't make them. If you are lazy, if you don't get the work that you love done, the world won't care if you die tomorrow and go into the grave and are gone and forgotten forever.

Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?"
"You sound so very old"
"Sometimes I'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always used to be that way?

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.

We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever.

For about 150 days a year in Venice, the sun doesn't show through the mist until noon.