Ray Bradbury Quotes

The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you're looking back ... well, it amounts to everything.

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

There is more than one way to burn a book.

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.

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

It's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

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

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

The terrible tyranny of the majority.

An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.

Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past - a combination of both.

How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?

I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.

You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon.

Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

I don't decide. My secret self decides. I just go with my subconscious. If it wants to do a poem, I do a poem, and if it wants to do a play, I do a play. So I'm not in charge, I'm not in control.

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

A life's work should be based on love.

A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am. But it burns with a high flame.

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

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.

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

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

I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it - and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything - so they never get anything.

All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!

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.

What church could compete with the fireworks of the pure soul?

May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

We are the witnesses to the miracle. We are put here by creation, by God....We're here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.

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.

The important thing is to be in love with something.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.

If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.

The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so.

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.

Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.