Ray Bradbury Quotes
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I don't decide. My secret self decides. I just go with my subconscious. If it wants to do a poem, I do a poem, and if it wants to do a play, I do a play. So I'm not in charge, I'm not in control.
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You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
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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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We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
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I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
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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.
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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!
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That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.
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Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.
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Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.
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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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We meet on the common ground of an uncommon age and share out our gifts of dark and light, good and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow.
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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.
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Not to write, for many of us, is to die.
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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.
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When the wind is right, a faint odor of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.
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I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?
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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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And the odd think in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said.
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How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.
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Don't think about things, just do them; don't predict them, just make them.
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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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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.
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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.