Ray Bradbury Quotes
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Television is very dangerous. Because it repeats and repeats and repeats our disasters, instead of our triumphs.
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I don't like to go to theaters, because I don't like the way most people behave in theaters.
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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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A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.
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Can't you recognize the human in the inhuman?
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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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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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Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.
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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'll be darned!" said Douglas. "I never thought of that. That's brilliant! It's true. Old people never were children!" "And it's kind of sad," said Tom, sitting still."There's nothing we can do to help them.
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People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.
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Sometimes you have intuitive insight about how you think things are going to be, and you write that. Other times you fantasize completely, which has nothing to do with predicting the future.
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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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In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.
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I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
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The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
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You must never name the goal. You must never tell us the target you're hitting for. You must automatically go toward it without ever naming it.
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All of my writing is God-given.
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Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me, I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.
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I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite. There!
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There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.
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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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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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One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more.