Ray Bradbury Quotes & Sayings

Kill two birds with one stone, feed the homeless to the hungry. — Ray Bradbury

Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together. — Ray Bradbury

He was still a kid inside. His body had grown, stretched, towered, tanned its skin, hardened its muscle, darkened its tawny shock of long hair, tightened its lines around jaw and eyes, thickened fingers and knuckles, but the brain didn't feel as if it had grown in sympathy with the rest. It was still green, full of tall, lush oaks and elms in summer; a creek ran through it, and the kids climbed around on its convolutions shouting, This way, gang - we'll take a short-cut and head them off at Dead Man's Gulch! — Ray Bradbury

The Greek philosophies teach us that we are a combination of dark and light, good and evil, and murderer and savior, hmm? And until we know this completely about ourselves we cannot love well, and we cannot forgive ourselves. — Ray Bradbury

A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it. — Ray Bradbury

[I love my work] intensely - I wouldn't be in it if I ever stopped loving it, I would shift it and go over into something else. ... I don't think life is worth living unless you're doing something you love completely, so that you get out of bed in the morning and want to rush to do it. If you're doing something mediocre, if you're doing something to fill in time, life really isn't worth living. ... I can't understand people not living at the top of their emotions constantly, living with their enthusiasms, living with some sense of joy, some sense of creativity - I don't care how small a level it is. ... I don't care what field it is though, and there's gotta be a field for everyone, doesn't there? — Ray Bradbury

Trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound. — Ray Bradbury

Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did. — Ray Bradbury

The Mexican people, once they have happened on a good food, he thought, flay the thing to distraction. Ham and eggs every morning now for two weeks. Since arriving in Guanajuato, bearing his typewriter, it had been the same thing each morning at nine. He stared at his plate, gently grieved.
("The Candy Skull") — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury

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

The remarkable thing about life quite often is meeting people you feel you were destined to meet — Ray Bradbury

Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books ... — Ray Bradbury

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

I'm afraid of them and they don't like me
because I'm afraid. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury

It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. — Ray Bradbury

You'll be found, your nickels, dimes and Indian-heads fused by electroplating. Abe Lincolns melted into Miss Columbias, eagles plucked raw on the backs of quarters, all run to quicksilver in your jeans. More! Any boy hit by lightning, lift his lid and there on his eyeball, pretty as the Lord's Prayer on a pin, find the last scene the boy ever saw! A box-Brownie photo, by God, of that fire climbing down the sky to blow you like a penny whistle, suck your soul back up along the bright stair! — Ray Bradbury

In the morning he would not have needed sleep, for all the warm odors and sights of a complete country night would have rested and slept him while his eyes were wide and his mouth, when he thought to test it, was half a smile. — Ray Bradbury

Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is THERE, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate. The logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses. — Ray Bradbury

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall. — Ray Bradbury

You learn to live with your crazy enthusiasms which nobody else shares, and then you find a few other nuts like yourself, and they're your friends for a lifetime. That's what friends are, the people who share your crazy outlook and protect you from the world, because nobody else is going to give a damn what you're doing, so you need a few other people like yourself. — Ray Bradbury

You don't have to turn on the TV set. You don't have to work on the Internet. It's up to you. — Ray Bradbury

Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness. — Ray Bradbury

We haven't been too bad, have we?"
"No, nor enormously good. I suppose that's the trouble - we haven't been much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of awful things. — Ray Bradbury

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

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. — Ray Bradbury

I've never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: 'Am I being joyful?' And if you've got a writer's block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you're writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject. — Ray Bradbury

Joy is the grace we say to God. — Ray Bradbury

Going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for dinner. — Ray Bradbury

He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow. — Ray Bradbury

Don't try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them. — Ray Bradbury

And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. Yes, — Ray Bradbury

I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I'd never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can't say I'm greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don't fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it. — Ray Bradbury

You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? — Ray Bradbury

Writing is like sex. You have to save your love for the love object. If you go around spouting about your idea, there'll be no "charge" left. You can't father children that way. — Ray Bradbury

Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I'll say yes. They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves. — Ray Bradbury

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

There's no one way to be creative. Any old way will work. — Ray Bradbury

The library is the biggest cracker box factory in the world. The more you eat, the more you want. — Ray Bradbury

'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen. — Ray Bradbury

I try to keep up with what's being done in every field, and most children's books are ten times more enjoyable than the average American novel right now. — Ray Bradbury

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." — Ray Bradbury

My business is to prevent the future. — Ray Bradbury

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? — Ray Bradbury

You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of the swimming between the clouds, like the enemy disks, and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire; that was how the night felt. — Ray Bradbury

Passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun. — Ray Bradbury

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

I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives. — Ray Bradbury

AT DAWN, a juggernaut of thunder wheeled over the stony heavens in a spark-throwing tumult. Rain fell softly on town cupolas, chuckled from rainspouts, and spoke in strange subterranean tongues beneath the windows where Jim and Will knew fitful dreams, slipping out of one, trying another for size, but finding all cut from the same dark, mouldered cloth. — Ray Bradbury

What is there about fire that's so lovely? Not matter what age we are, what draws us to it? It's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It's a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you're a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical. — Ray Bradbury

I don't go around thinking I'm Ray Bradbury all the time. — Ray Bradbury

Page 33 "Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm very antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this. — Ray Bradbury

Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that too. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren't many 'human beings' left to look, see, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running, jumping, there's no time to study one another. But I guess that's bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury

Live in the library, for Christ's sake! Don't live on your goddamn computers and the internet and all that crap. Go to the library! — Ray Bradbury

Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe. — Ray Bradbury

I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid. My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. — Ray Bradbury

School busses ... Won't even give us a chance to be late for school ... Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare,Doug, just think it all over. — Ray Bradbury

There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them. — Ray Bradbury

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament. — Ray Bradbury

He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge, and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-- quite--touched--bottom--never--never--quite--no not quite--touched bottom... and you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either... never... quite... touched... anything — Ray Bradbury

So it was the hand that started it all ... His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms ... His hands were ravenous. — Ray Bradbury

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes! — Ray Bradbury

Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly. — Ray Bradbury

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start. — Ray Bradbury

That's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and WORTH the doing. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury

All of my writing is God-given. — Ray Bradbury

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves — Ray Bradbury

I do not use my intellect to write my stories and books; I have a gut reaction to the things that my subconscious gives me. — Ray Bradbury

Don't talk about it; write. — Ray Bradbury

Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean. — Ray Bradbury

Tell us again, for we forget, that work done without love is stillborn, mindless, and lost in the very hour of its deliverance. — Ray Bradbury

So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness. — Ray Bradbury

She went away, and the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered after her like an errant constellation, showing her how to walk in darkness. I heard her say, faintly, "We've got to try, anyway. — Ray Bradbury

But the full moon soothes all sick animal, be they human or plan field beast. there is a serenity of color, a quietude of touch, a sweet sculpturing of mind and body in full moonlight. — Ray Bradbury

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. — Ray Bradbury

No, no, it's not in books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into on garment for us. — Ray Bradbury

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time - And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel. — Ray Bradbury

There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people. — Ray Bradbury

Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before ... It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over. — Ray Bradbury

We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up. — Ray Bradbury

My goal is to entertain myself and others. — Ray Bradbury

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. — Ray Bradbury

The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury

I think we're doing a dreadful job of educating. — Ray Bradbury

Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards? — Ray Bradbury

Because the Muse persists. — Ray Bradbury

Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon. Not theories, however. Theories are invigorating and tonic. Give me an ounce of fact and I will produce you a ton of theory by tea this afternoon. That is, after all, my job. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury

it's just how you look at it, Charlie. Things are what you want them to be. — Ray Bradbury

The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury

Chock them so ... full of "facts" they feel stuffed, but absolutely "brilliant" with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. — Ray Bradbury

Every day is Christmas Day to a dog. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury