Ray Bradbury Quotes
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An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.
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Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye.
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I write all of my novels and stories, as you have seen, in a great surge of delightful passion. Only recently, glancing at the novel, I realized that Montag is named after a paper manufacturing company. And Faber, of course, is a maker of pencils! What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus. And not tell me!
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Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.
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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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Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.
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If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.
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It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.
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When you're older you want to learn from other people.
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The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.
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A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.
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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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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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Don't they get afraid, then?" "They have a religion for that.
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Most of my short stories are fantasy.
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So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.
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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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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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I am a dedicated madman, and that becomes its own training. If you can't resist, if the typewriter is like candy to you, you train yourself for a lifetime. Every single day of your life, some wild new thing to be done. You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. Then your public reads you and it begins to gather around your selling a potato peeler in an alley, you know. The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I've written. When the joy stops, I'll stop writing.
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We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.
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When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.
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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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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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Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.