Ray Bradbury Quotes
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I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
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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.
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When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life - that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.
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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.
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I'll tell you," said Beatty, smiling at his cards. "That made you for a little while a drunkard. Read a few lines and off you go over the cliff. Bang, you're ready to blow up the world, chop off heads, knock down women and children, destroy authority. I know. I've been through it all.
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I don't like realism. We already know the real facts about life, most of the basic facts. I'm not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we're 18, we're up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It's interpretation.
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All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn.
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Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
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Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.
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No person ever died that had a family.
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The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.
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Fame and money are gifts given to us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths.
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A library is all the university you will ever need.
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We are anthill men upon an anthill world.
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I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.
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Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.
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The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
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Tell us again, for we forget, that work done without love is stillborn, mindless, and lost in the very hour of its deliverance.
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I don't think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don't take the toys out of their hands, we're fools.
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I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.
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I shall remain on Mars and read a book.
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Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.
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Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience.
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The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.