Ray Bradbury Quotes
-
A life's work should be based on love.
-
There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves
-
You can make yourself happy or miserable - it's the same amount of effort.
-
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.
-
Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.
-
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. 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 a writer. Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview (Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)
-
Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.
-
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.
-
My parents read the comics to me, and I fell in love with comic strips. I've collected them all of my life. I have a complete collection of all the "Buck Rogers" Sunday funnies and daily paper strips, I have all of "Prince Valiant" put away, all of "Tarzan," which appeared in the Sunday funnies in 1932 right on up through high school. So I've learned a lot from reading comics as a child.
-
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.
-
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.
-
I've never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: 'Am I being joyful?' And if you've got a writer's block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you're writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject.
-
I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.
-
If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
-
Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take ares each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.
-
First grade is very cheap. It's the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don't do it right.
-
The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen, and the sun burnt Time, that meant everything burnt!
-
It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know Im drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe
-
We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.
-
The critics are generally wrong, or they're fifteen, twenty years late. It's a great shame. They miss out on a lot.
-
I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can't do that on a computer.
-
For these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. Such are the autumn people.
-
I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
-
Lone at night, when I was twelve years old, I looked at the planet Mars and I said, 'Take me home!' And the planet Mars took me home, and I never came back. So I've written every day in the last 75 years. I've never stopped writing.