Ray Bradbury Quotes

Your mind's always juggling, isn't it?-mirrors, torches, plates.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

You've been put on the world to love the act of being alive.

The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.

I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.

People try to force things. It's disastrous. Just leave your mind alone. Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.

The human race likes to give itself airs. One good volcano can produce more greenhouse gases in a year than the human race has in its entire history.

Savory...that's a swell word. And Basil and Betel. Capsicum. Curry. All great. But Relish, now, Relish with a capital R. No argument, that' the best.

Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

Life shoould be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at other move forward with it.

Those who don't build must burn.

I never went to college, so I went to the library.

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

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Remember, Montag, we're the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

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

The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.

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.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.

God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

I want your loves to be multiple. I don't want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it.

Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading.

I love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living.

Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.

The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow

You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!

Most of my stories are ideas in action. In other words, I get a concept, and I let it run away. I find a character to act out the idea. And then the story takes care of itself.

If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't.

To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes.

Everything is generated through your own will power.

There's a lot of crap out there. Most of the science fiction films alone are abominations, you know. They're mindless. So you can't learn from those kinds of films.

There is only one type of story in the world-your story.

Any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don't build a story; you allow it to explode.

Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?

Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.

The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water.... The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water.

There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.

Sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.

My characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they are gone.

No person ever died that had a family.