Ray Bradbury Quotes
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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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Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.
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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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He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out.
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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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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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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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Surprise is where creativity comes in.
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With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.
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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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The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.
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Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
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Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.
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There is only one type of story in the world-your story.
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Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.
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Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?" "Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.
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Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, 'I love you for what you do.'
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Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.
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These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.
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Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.
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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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Heaven is a house with porch lights.
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The merry-go-round was running, yes, but... It was running backward. The small calliope inside the carousel machinery rattle-snapped its nervous-stallion shivering drums, clashed its harvest-moon cymbals, toothed its castanets, and throatily choked and sobbed its reeds, whistles, and baroque flutes.
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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.