Ray Bradbury Quotes
-
Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you've done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I'll be damned, I did this today. It doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad-you did it. At the end of the week you'll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year.
-
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.
-
A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
-
There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves
-
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.
-
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.
-
Not to write, for many of us, is to die.
-
Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Morrocan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.
-
They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.
-
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.
-
You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.
-
When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.
-
When I finished writing it, I was crying. I knew at long last, after ten years of trying, I had written something good.
-
You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
-
Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.
-
If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
-
I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.
-
I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.
-
If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.
-
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.
-
Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there was it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away.
-
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!
-
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.
-
You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.