Ray Bradbury Quotes
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I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.
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Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
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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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We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.
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The critics are generally wrong, or they're fifteen, twenty years late. It's a great shame. They miss out on a lot.
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The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.
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Touch a scientist and you touch a child.
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In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
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Good to evil seems evil
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Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.
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The world doesn't give a damn about you unless you do something. Those are the rules; I didn't make them. If you are lazy, if you don't get the work that you love done, the world won't care if you die tomorrow and go into the grave and are gone and forgotten forever.
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Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action?
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Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.
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Not to write, for many of us, is to die.
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In that film Love Story, there's a line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you're sorry every day for some little thing or other.
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Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.
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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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Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.
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Life shoould be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at other move forward with it.
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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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I wake up in the morning and I lie in bed, and it's the time I call "the theater of morning." All these thoughts run around in my head, between my ears when I'm waking up. It's not a dream state, but it's not completely awake either. So all these metaphors run around and then I pick one and I get out of bed and I do it. I'm very lucky.
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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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You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon.
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Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.