Ray Bradbury Quotes
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The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
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Surprise is where creativity comes in.
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I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.
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In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.
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In our time the search for extraterrestrial life will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences. Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there.
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Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.
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I’ve learned that by doing things, things get done.
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He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.
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What should I do?" "Throw up in your typewriter every morning." "Yeah." "Clean up every noon.
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You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
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That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
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If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
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My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead.
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If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.
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Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
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Christ is one of the 'family' now. I often wonder if God recognizes his own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine - when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that ever worshiper absolutely needs.
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Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.
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The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.
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Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.
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Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.
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Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.
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Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered...sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks.
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"That's sad," said Montag, quietly, "because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know."
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I laugh until I weep And weep until I smile