Ray Bradbury Quotes

Love is easy, and I love writing.

I don't believe in colleges and universities.

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

The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

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.

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'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 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 take this continent with me into the grave.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

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

..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen.

I'm numb and I'm tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I'd been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I'm soaked to the skin with emotion.

Why then you're as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust 'reality' and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.

I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well and good.

...passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.

But no man's a hero to himself.

Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.

In order to be creative, you don't have to be original.

Fire the doubters out of your life.

I don't understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway. Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?

Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn't matter if you have a beautiful face or not.

If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.

You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.

The one sure way I can dishonor myself is by worrying about my reputation.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, 'I love you for what you do.'

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.

The gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

We meet on the common ground of an uncommon age and share out our gifts of dark and light, good and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow.

Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do-and they don’t. They have prejudices.

Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.

Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.

This is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight, we have given the lie to gravity.We have reached for the stars.

At the top of your lungs, shout and listen to the echoes. You must live life at the top of your voice!

Every day is Christmas Day to a dog.

A day without writing was a little death.

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.

I'm not a serious person, and I don't like serious people.

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.

You don't have to worry about the future, you don't worry about the past - you just explode.

Libraries are the center of our lives. There's no use going to a university if you don't live at the library.

And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.