Ray Bradbury Quotes
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A single face turned upward toward all Time One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.
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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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The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
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I'm trying to teach people of all ages to, number one: how to criticize, how to offer creative analysis on top of that, how to try to build things in a new direction and how to compliment people when the thing gets done.
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Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
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If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.
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You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.
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Now let's take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!
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And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.
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Any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don't build a story; you allow it to explode.
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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.
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What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?
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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.
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Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.
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Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.
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When I finished writing it, I was crying. I knew at long last, after ten years of trying, I had written something good.
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There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.
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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.
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We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.
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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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(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?) Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.
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I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour.
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Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
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You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year