Ray Bradbury Quotes

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while.

You fail only if you stop writing.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

Life should be touched, not strangled.

Good to evil seems evil

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

When a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

...I mean, you don't just love people, you must LOVE them with exclamation points.

Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.

We're a free society; we've got television. We have radio. We have newspapers. We have the videocassette, which is coming into play. These are new freedoms.

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.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.

You don’t question Providence. If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.

Stuff your eyes with wonder.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

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

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

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.

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.

Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?

Life is about trying things to see if they work.

A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

Television is very dangerous. Because it repeats and repeats and repeats our disasters, instead of our triumphs.

Don't think about things, just do them; don't predict them, just make them.

The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.

Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.

We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

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.

Surprise is where creativity comes in.

Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

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.