Bradbury Quotes & Sayings
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Top Bradbury Quotes
Sneezes pent but set like traps, the boys crouched, stood, lay sweating a cool and constant brine. — Ray Bradbury
The remarkable thing about life quite often is meeting people you feel you were destined to meet — Ray Bradbury
Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man's attitude when he has power. — Ray Bradbury
He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. — Ray Bradbury
It's rare you get an idea from a dream. I can't really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I've ever had a dream that held up. They're much too dislocated — Ray Bradbury
And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer. — Ray Bradbury
Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years. — Junot Diaz
For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it & sometimes break in two. I've known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. — Ray Bradbury
And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. — Ray Bradbury
Once you let yourself begin to be grown-up, you face a world full of problems you can't solve. The politicians and specialists - adults, all - have a hard enough time trying to figure out where to look. It doesn't have to be that way. The greatest solutions in society are reached by corporate thinking, ruled by a motive to either make a profit or go out of business. — 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
When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field. — Ray Bradbury
It was all a mistake," he pleaded, standing out of his ship, his wife slumped behind him in the deeps of the hold, like a dead woman. "I came to Mars like any honest enterprising businessman. I took some surplus material from a rocket that crashed and I built me the finest little stand you ever saw right there on that land by the crossroads - you know where it is. You've got to admit it's a good job of building." Sam laughed, staring around. "And that Martian - I know he was a friend of yours - came. His death was an accident, I assure you. All I wanted to do was have a hot-dog stand, the only one on Mars, the first and most important one. You understand how it is? I was going to serve the best darned hot dogs there, with chili and onions and orange juice." The — Ray Bradbury
And it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty. How — Ray Bradbury
Once in a lifetime anyway, it's nice to make a mistake if you think it'll do somebody some good," she — Ray Bradbury
I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter. — Ray Bradbury
How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike. — Ray Bradbury
I laugh until I weep And weep until I smile — Ray Bradbury
We should have stayed on the moon. We should have made moon the base, instead of building space stations, which are fragile and which fly apart. — Ray Bradbury
Evil has only the power that we give it. — Ray Bradbury
..holding a book but reading the empty spaces. — Ray Bradbury
For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead ... We're nothing more than dust jackets for books ... so many pages to a person ... — Ray Bradbury
Ah, no, ah, no. There, senor, you would be wrong. Knowing that after the first year the rent is liable not to be paid, we bury the poorest two feet down. It is less work, you understand? of course, we must judge by the family who owns a body. — 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
Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it. — Ray Bradbury
I write all of my novels and stories, as you have seen, in a great surge of delightful passion. Only recently, glancing at the novel, I realized that Montag is named after a paper manufacturing company. And Faber, of course, is a maker of pencils! What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus. And not tell me! — Ray Bradbury
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! — Ray Bradbury
Intuited novels are far more 'true' than all your scribbled data-fact reportage in the history of the world! — Ray Bradbury
So in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do, depending on the season and the need. — Ray Bradbury
I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I'll get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold onto the world so tight some day. I've got a finger on it now; that's a beginning. — Ray Bradbury
I sat and three hours later realized I had been seized by an idea that started short but grew to wild size by day's end. The concept was so riveting I found it hard at sunset to flee the library basement and take the bus home to reality: my house, my wife, and our baby daughter. — Ray Bradbury
No," moaned Tom in despair. "School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer's even over! Ruin half the vacation! — Ray Bradbury
When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination. — Ray Bradbury
Marie's eyes slammed the furthest wall after a back-forth, back-forth swinging from horror to horror, from skull to skull, beating from rib to rib, staring with hypnotic fascination at paralyzed, loveless, fleshless loins, at men made into women by evaporation, of women made into dugged swine. the fearful ricochet of vision, growing, growing, taking impetus from swollen breast to raving mouth, wall to wall, again, again, like a ball hurled in a game, caught in the incredible teeth, spat in a scream across the corridor to be caught in the claws, lodged between thin teats, the whole standing chorus invisibly chanting the game on, on, the wild game of sight recoiling, rebounding, re-shuttling on down the inconceivable procession, through a montage of erected horrors that ended finally and for all time when vision crashed against the corridor ending with one last scream from all present. — Ray Bradbury
The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas. — Ray Bradbury
This is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted. There — Ray Bradbury
I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I took pictures of Myrna Loy and Joel McCrea in front of the studios. I loved Hollywood. I have 500 autographs and 500 photographs I took. — Ray Bradbury
It was indeed a time between, one second their thoughts all brambled airedale, the next all silken slumbering cat. It was a time to go to bed, yet still they lingered reluctant as boys to give over and wander in wide circles to pillow and night thoughts. It was a time to say much but not all. It was a time after first discoveries but not last ones. It was wanting to know everything and wanting to know nothing. It was the new sweetness of men starting to talk as they must talk. It was the possible bitterness of revelation. — Ray Bradbury
People who take books on sex to bed become frigid. You get self-conscious. You can't think a story. You can't think, "I shall do a story to improve mankind." Well, it's nonsense. All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't. A story is the same way. You either feel a story and need to write it, or you better not write it. — Ray Bradbury
I got started as an actor when I was 12. — Ray Bradbury
When I finished [writing it], I was crying. I knew at long last, after ten years of trying, I had written something good. — Ray Bradbury
Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I'd like to spend more time with her. — Ray Bradbury
I don't control my writing - it controls me. — Ray Bradbury
If someone sends you a love letter you've got to answer back. — Ray Bradbury
They sat on the edge of a brook and took off their shoes and let the water cut their feet off to the ankles with an exquisite cold razor. — Ray Bradbury
I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature. — Sam Weller
What did the others give to each other?
Nothingness.
Granger stood looking back with Montag. 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. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, 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. The
difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the
touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the
gardener will be there a lifetime. — Ray Bradbury
If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape. — Ray Bradbury
I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation? — Ray Bradbury
The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so. — Ray Bradbury
If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is
excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. — Ray Bradbury
The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they're done, not to worry about things ahead of time. — Ray Bradbury
Think I'll go eat me a doughnut and take me a nap. — Ray Bradbury
As Samuel Spaulding, Esquire, once said, 'Dig in the earth, delve in the soul.' Spin those mower blades, Bill, and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth. End of lecture. Besides, a mess of dandelion greens is good eating once in a while. — Ray Bradbury
What did you give to the city, Montag?
Ashes.
What did the others give to each other?
Nothingness. — Ray Bradbury
The Animal does not question lif. It lives. It's very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life. — Ray Bradbury
That's what I want, a mental evidence I can feel. I don't want physical evidence, proof you have to go out and drag in. I want evidence that you can carry in your mind and always touch and smell and feel. But there's no way to do that. In order to believe in a thing you've got to carry it with you. You can't carry the Earth, or a man, in your pocket. I want a way to do that, carry things with me always, so I can believe in them. How clumsy to have to go to all the trouble of going out and bringing in something terribly physical to prove something. I hate physical things because they can be left behind and become impossible to believe in them. — Ray Bradbury
For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren't looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching! — Ray Bradbury
Look," he tried, "put two men in a rail car, one a soldier, the other a farmer. One talks war, the other wheat; and bore each other to sleep. But let one spell long-distance running, and if the other once ran the mile, why, those men will run all night like boys, sparking a friendship up from memory. So, all men have one business in common: women, and can talk that till sunrise and beyond. Hell. — Ray Bradbury
Don't let people interfere with you. Boot 'em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone. — Ray Bradbury
When you strip all the clothes away and the doodads, you have two human beings who were either happy or unhappy — Ray Bradbury
She was too wonderful a character to be allowed to die and I realize now that I should have allowed her to appear at hte end of my book. [Ray writes about the character Clarisse] — Ray Bradbury
They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. — Ray Bradbury
You don't have to burn books, do you, if the world starts to fill up with nonreaders, nonlearners, non-knowers? — Ray Bradbury
First and foremost, [Writing] reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. — Ray Bradbury
We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe ... If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal. — Ray Bradbury
No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. — Ray Bradbury
For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is CERTAIN, that nothing bad will ever happen to ME. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there ARE. But let's not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up to you, it's too late, isn't it, Montag? — Ray Bradbury
Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. — Ray Bradbury
I don't belong with you. I've been an idiot all the way — Ray Bradbury
My grandfather ran off the V-2 rocket film a dozen times and then hoped that someday our cities would open up more and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be. You see? — Ray Bradbury
If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important. — Ray Bradbury
We're the start of an amazing, dumbfounding history of survival that will only get better as the centuries pass. — Ray Bradbury
I wish I had known him, but he was just another shadow outside my screen door and I already had a sufficiency of shadows in. — Ray Bradbury
We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! — Ray Bradbury
When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers. — Ray Bradbury
Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you? — Ray Bradbury
It doesn't have to be the greatest but it does have to be you. — Ray Bradbury
The one sure way I can dishonor myself is by worrying about my reputation. — Ray Bradbury
I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.
Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on. — Ray Bradbury
Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? — Ray Bradbury
The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It's problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems. — Ray Bradbury
A ton of Proust isn't worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury. — J.G. Ballard
There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury has a vacation house in Palm Springs, California, in the desert at the base of the Santa Rosa mountains. It's a Rat Pack-era affair, with a chrome-and-turquoise kitchen and a small swimming pool in back. — Sam Weller
Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. — 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
And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me. — Ray Bradbury
Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them. — Ray Bradbury
I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those darn five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there'd be no night! — Ray Bradbury
And the sea moved her back down the shore. — Ray Bradbury
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." ~Ray Bradbury — Ray Bradbury
Beware the autumn people — Ray Bradbury
The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All — Ray Bradbury
See the fish ... Just like war. War swims along, sees food, contracts. A moment later - Earth is gone. — Ray Bradbury
It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the moist swampland. One of those things in a big jar that makes your stomach jump as it does when you see a preserved arm in a laboratory vat. — Ray Bradbury