Ray Bradbury Quotes
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You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!
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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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Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.
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We're going to become the martians when we land there. When we explore and build communities, we become the martians. That's a wonderful destiny for all of us.
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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.
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It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.
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Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.
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I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.
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What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?
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I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.
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I don't believe in government. I hate politics. I'm against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.
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But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.
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You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year
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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.
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You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
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Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
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God, here and there, makes madness a calling.
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Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.
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Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye.
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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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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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I was only kicking down the Christmas tree to get the star on top.
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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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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.