Ray Bradbury Quotes: 66

• 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.

• 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.

• You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

• 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.

• I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

  Zen in the Art of Writing

• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

  Zen in the Art of Writing

• 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.

  Fahrenheit 451

• We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

• There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

• 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.

• Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

  Fahrenheit 451

• If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong."Or "She's going to hurt me."Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ."Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.

• There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

  Fahrenheit 451

• Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

• Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try"to do things. You simply "must"do things.

• The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

  Fahrenheit 451

• Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.

  Fahrenheit 451

• We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

• 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.

• The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

  Fahrenheit 451

• Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

• But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

  Fahrenheit 451

• A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

  Dandelion Wine

• Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

• First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

• It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

  Fahrenheit 451

• Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

• The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

  The October Country

• Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

• Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

• We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.

  Fahrenheit 451

• We're all fools,"said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.

  The Illustrated Man

• 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.

  Zen in the Art of Writing

• Libraries raised me.

• Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

  Zen in the Art of Writing

• Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

  Fahrenheit 451

• Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

• His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

  Farewell Summer

• Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

• Are you happy?

  Fahrenheit 451

• Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

• But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.

  Long After Midnight

• He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

  Fahrenheit 451

• That's life for you,"said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.

  The Fog Horn

• The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

  Fahrenheit 451

• 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.

  Fahrenheit 451

• 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.

  Fahrenheit 451

• I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.

  Fahrenheit 451

• For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

  Fahrenheit 451

• The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.

  Fahrenheit 451

• Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.

  Fahrenheit 451

• From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

• Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.

  Fahrenheit 451

• We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.

• Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

  Fahrenheit 451

• Hello!"He said hello and then said, "What are you up to now?" "I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it. "I don't think I'd like that,"he said. "You might if you tried." "I never have."She licked her lips. "Rain even tastes good." "What do you do, go around trying everything once?"he asked. "Sometimes twice.

  Fahrenheit 451

• Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

  Fahrenheit 451

• I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

  Fahrenheit 451

• The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

  Fahrenheit 451

• It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

• The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

• Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

  A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories

• Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer."[1967 interview]

• Don't they get afraid, then?" "They have a religion for that.

  The October Country

• We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.

• Surprise is where creativity comes in.