Ray Bradbury Quotes
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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.
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If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.
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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.
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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 mean, you don't just love people, you must LOVE them with exclamation points.
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If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.
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You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
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And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over.
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A single face turned upward toward all Time One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.
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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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I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.
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Do what you love, don't do anything else.
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There are a lot of wonderful women writers who would be good influences on writers. You've got to spread yourself out and educate yourself with all kinds of stories.
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Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done.
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You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.
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Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.
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Everything that happens before Death is what counts.
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Don't talk about it; write.
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Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course.
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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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How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.
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I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.
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The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
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I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.