Ray Bradbury Quotes

It was a pleasure to burn.

I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love.

The things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love should be things that you do.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.

And suddenly everything, absolutely everything, was there.

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.

The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

If Blake said that, said Father Brian, he never lived in Dublin.

My job is to help you fall in love.

How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.

Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.

Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."

I believe the universe created us - we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious.

I have two rules in life - to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done.

You must never name the goal. You must never tell us the target you're hitting for. You must automatically go toward it without ever naming it.

If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.

When I graduated from high school I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years.

If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite. There!

Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead

I don't like being up high. It took me three days to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors. They're judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c'mon, that's ridiculous. But they're doing it.

So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.

Write 1000 words a day. That's only about four pages, but force yourself to do it. Put your finger down your throat and throw up. That's what writing's all about.

Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.

I don't believe in colleges and universities.

Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores. They're damn boring. They have no imagination, and they don't know how to imagine the future.

I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.

I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money.

I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.

Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.

When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.

Everything is generated through your own will power. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. This is a democracy. You go where you want to go and do what you want to do.

(...) And metaphors like cats behind your smile, Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride, Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)

Can't you recognize the human in the inhuman?

Action is hope. There is no hope without action.

Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.

I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.

Love is easy, and I love writing.

Ideas result from the collision of metaphors inside the head.