Ray Bradbury Quotes
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The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.
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You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
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Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.
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Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.
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I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.
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Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.
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We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe. If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal.
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Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
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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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I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.
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It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt.
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What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?
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I was partially raised by an aunt who was a dress designer, so I was around her studio all of my early life. I know materials. I can look through Harper's Bazaar and decide what works and what doesn't, or any other magazine, Seventeen if you wish.
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Get rid of those friends of yours who make fun of you and don't believe in you. And when you leave here tonight, go home, make a phone call and fire them. Anyone that doesn't believe in you and your future, to hell with them.
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Reality and Fiction are different in that fiction has to make sense.
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The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.
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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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I love the musical form of books. It's a different way of doing things, it's very beautiful. You're able to sing things instead of saying them. So what the heck - why not do them?
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I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.
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For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person.
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The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It's problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems.
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If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
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I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.
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Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.