Ray Bradbury Quotes
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Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.
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You feed yourself. Make sure you have all the information, whether it's aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, I don't care what it is. Then you walk away from it and let it ferment. You ignore it and pretend you don't care. Next thing you know, the answer comes.
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When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field.
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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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If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.
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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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The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.
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Kill two birds with one stone, feed the homeless to the hungry.
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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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You don't have to worry about the future, you don't worry about the past - you just explode.
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Go out and make your own speeches. People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, "Hey, we got a crazy man in the community," and they'll begin talking to you.
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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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People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.
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You fail only if you stop writing.
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I'm trying to teach people of all ages to, number one: how to criticize, how to offer creative analysis on top of that, how to try to build things in a new direction and how to compliment people when the thing gets done.
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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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The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful. I’ve had a sign by my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, ‘DON’T THINK!’
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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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Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books.
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From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?
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I believe in Darwin and God together.
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I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?
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I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.
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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.