Ray Bradbury Quotes
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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.
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Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.
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Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
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The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you're looking back ... well, it amounts to everything.
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I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.
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I love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living.
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So in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do, depending on the season and the need.
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There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
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How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.
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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.
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Can't you recognize the human in the inhuman?
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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.
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So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.
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I never consciously place symbolism in my writing. That would be a self-conscious exercise and self-consciousness is defeating to any creative act. Better to get the subconscious to do the work for you, and get out of the way. The best symbolism is always unsuspected and natural. During a lifetime, one saves up information which collects itself around centers in the mind; these automatically become symbols on a subliminal level and need only be summoned in the heat of writing.
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It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.
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To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root - first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you've got the future secured.
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God, here and there, makes madness a calling.
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Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt
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I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.
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Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.
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Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.
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You have to be very productive in order to become excellent. You have to go through a poor period and a mediocre period, and then you move into your excellent period. It may be very well be that some of you have done quite a bit of writing already. You maybe ready to move into your good period and your excellent period. But you shouldn't be surprised if it becomes a very long process.
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Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.
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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.