Ray Bradbury Quotes
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
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.
I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I put myself together bit by bit. The hardest part is crawling out of the crater.
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.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times… and at others move forward with it.
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over. So in a series of kindness, there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
The first thing they teach you at journalism school is to never repeat a word or a phrase, never use the same verb twice in one story. This is a discredited bit of advice.
I wish you would trade a couple of your perfect sentences for a sympathetic heart.
Having a backbone of steel doesn’t mean you have to be rigid. It means you can bend and adapt without breaking.
The weak fall, but the strong will remain and never go under!
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
We are an impossibility, a contradiction, accessing realms only imagined by the depths of our subconscious.
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.
Living at risk is jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down.
The grandest and greatest of all literature was ransom for my life, literature of a world worth dying for, worth LIVING for.
Like Alice stepping through the looking glass, we step through our television screen and walk into the true world.
The stars are yours if you have the head, the hands and the heart for them.
To grow, to discover, to see world beneath freshly flung snow.
Let the mind and the body go and be carried by the love of storytelling, the narrative for its own sake.
I am writing this book because we’re all going to die, in the loneliness of never being known or understood.
There are times when you are in the country and you become the country.
Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.
Storytelling is a powerful act of magic, powerful enough to transform the storyteller and the listener alike.
The universe shivered once, and the stars rearranged themselves slightly, longing for you.
We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren’t on our lists, people we’ve never met but still want to protect.
We scorched our wings stepping through the TV screen into a new consciousness. We entered an arena we knew nothing about and discovered murderers plotting sick atrocities with frilly penmanship.
Having nothing to say and saying it: that is literature.
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.
The wonderful thing about falling apart quietly is that you can start over as many times as you like.
My stories run up and bite me on the leg. I respond by writing them down.
The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
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.
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 real artists is the artists throws himself into the work, heads first.
I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.
The best thing for being sad, replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn.
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
We are anthologies of wanderers, dreamers, strange souls, and lonely hearts.
Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.
Time is measured in love, miracle by miracle.
There is only one type of story in the world: Your story.
There are no rules. You can write a story, if you wish, with no conflict, no suspense, no beginning, middle or end. Of course, you have to be regarded as a genius to get away with it, and that’s the hardest part – convincing everybody you’re a genius.