Ray Bradbury Quotes

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.. Ray Bradbury

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream,

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.. Ray Bradbury

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.. Ray Bradbury

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures..

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.. Ray Bradbury

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the

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.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.. Ray Bradbury

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and

His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

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.

Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we’d die, we’d wander around and sleep like cats.

Who are your friends? Do they believe in you? Or do they stunt your growth with ridicule and disbelief? If the latter, you haven't friends. Go find some.

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth

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.

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.

Are you happy?

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

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

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.

The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it.

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...

And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world...

I take this continent with me into the grave.

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant.

"May I ask you a question?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever thought you were Christ?"

"I can't say that I have. But I have considered that God was good to me to let me find what I was looking for, if that's what you mean.

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the shared deep.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

Don't they get afraid, then?"
"They have a religion for that.

I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?

Surprise is where creativity comes in.

Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

Libraries raised me.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt...

Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.

There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.

Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!

The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we musn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

How's Uncle Louis today?" "Who?" "And Aunt Maude?

The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.

The mosquitos were gone from the porch, and surely when they abandoned the conflict the war with Time was really done, there was nothing for it but that humans also forsake the battleground.

So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.

In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

I shall remain on Mars and read a book.

But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving catting of the majority.

Isn't this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it.

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?

Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.

He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?

No," said a voice, "the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.

Beware the autumn people

Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

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.

You don’t question Providence. If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

...We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.

There it is."
And he watched with now-gentle sorrow and now-quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance as all the bits and pieces of his house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily again.
"The Happiness Machine," he said. "The Happiness Machine.

It followed then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh.

But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.

And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling gibbering manikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him.

To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

and sleeping put an end to summer, 1928,

There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.

There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms.

Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?

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.

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

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.

I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn't stand most men shuffling along with all the iron of the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds.

God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.

But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.

Science fiction is the art of the possible not the impossible.

Jump and let's build our wings on the way down

Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.

Men are men, unfortunately, no matter what their shape, and inclined to sin.

It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to drink, and we held the cold glasses in our hands, and Dad read the stereo-newspapers inserted into the special hat you put on your head and which turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three times in succession.

I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.

And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.

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

Creativity is a continual surprise.

Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.

إذا أخفيت جهلك جيداً .. لن يؤذيك أحد، ولكنك لن تتعلم أيضاً

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?

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer."

[1967 interview]

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