Ray Bradbury Quotes
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I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they're always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, 'We're going to break all the laws of physics.' ... Most people don't realize it, but the series of films which have made more money than any other series of films in the history of the universe is the James Bond series. They're all science fiction, too - romantic, adventurous, frivolous, fantastic science fiction!
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The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.
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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.
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Those who don't build must burn.
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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 have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?
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It was a pleasure to burn.
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All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It's my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset, I've won or lost. At sunrise, I'm out again, giving it the old try.
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When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.
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I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!
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When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits. Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real. Make haste to live. Oh, God, yes. Live. And write. With great haste.
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And the lesson was this; sit in the sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in a flickery light, or open light, and the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time, bringing rain, and the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you full.
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Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, 'Hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours.
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Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
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My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
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Do what you love, don't do anything else.
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We've got to reinvest in space travel. We should have never left the moon.
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The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water.... The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water.
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Without the library, you have no civilization.
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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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Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
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And the odd think in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said.
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Write 1000 words a day. That's only about four pages, but force yourself to do it. Put your finger down your throat and throw up. That's what writing's all about.