Ray Bradbury Quotes

• A life's work should be based on love.
• 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.
• I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite.
• 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?
• 'My stories run up and bite me in the leg- I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.'
• Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.
• My job is to help you fall in love.
• Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.
• 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.
• The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.
• We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
• The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.
• If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.
• 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.
• Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid.
• I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.
• And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it 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. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
• From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
• People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.
• Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.
• Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.
• Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.
• You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. (Bradbury 86)
• With schools 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. (Bradbury 26)
• If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
• 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?
• Montag, you're looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.
• Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . 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.
• There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
• Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
• For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. 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.
• Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.
• Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
• At 7 a.m. all my voices start talking inside my head, and when it reaches a certain pitch I jump out and trap them before they're gone. Or I shower and then the voices talk. You solve problems not by thinking directly of them but allowing them to ferment in their own time.
• Bill Gates and his partners are flimflamming America. (1995)
• Bill, I don't do Windows.
• Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.
• Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
• If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: 'It's gonna go wrong.' Or 'She's going to hurt me.' Or,'I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . .' Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.
• If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.
• If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.
• Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
• Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.
• [Television is] a really dreadful influence on all of us. Don't ever look at local television news again. It's all crap. There's no news, there's no information. It's negative, negative, negative. You look at that, and you think the world is coming to an end.
• The animated cartoon is just about the purest, least arguable, most invigorating art form invented since mankind did shadow shows with wriggling fingers, then trapped them in cave-wall graffiti 200 generations ago...
• The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance- the idea that anything is possible.
• The jails are full of one million non-readers. We can't let it happen again. If you allow another generation to grow up to be 12 years old... without the ability to read, write, and think, we're sunk. If they can't read, if they can't write, if they can't think, they become criminals. We've already lost two generations. Unless we teach reading intensely and completely in kindergarten and first grade, the whole civilization goes to hell.
• The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
• There still are people who will come up to you and say: 'Science Fiction? Ha! Why read that?!' The most direct, off-putting reply is: Science fiction is the most important fiction ever invented by writers. It saw a whole mob of troubles pouring toward us across the shoals of time and cried, 'Head for the hills, the dam is broke!' But no one listened. Now, people have pricked up their ears, and opened their eyes.
• Touch a scientist and you touch a child.
• We are an impossibility in an impossible universe
• We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
• When people ask me where I get my imagination, I simply lament, 'God, here and there, makes madness a calling.'
• Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
• You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
• You feed yourself. Make sure you have all the information, whether it's aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, I don't care what it is. Then you walk away from it and let it ferment. You ignore it and pretend you don't care. Next thing you know, the answer comes.
• You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
• There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.
• First of all, 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.
• If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
• There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

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