Ray Bradbury quote: "Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?"

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during ...
RAY BRADBURY

It's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid.
RAY BRADBURY

The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors. They're judges and jurors...
RAY BRADBURY

There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people...
RAY BRADBURY

He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother'...
RAY BRADBURY

Beware the autumn people
RAY BRADBURY

That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at ...
RAY BRADBURY

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought...
RAY BRADBURY

Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. F...
RAY BRADBURY

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so ...
RAY BRADBURY

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn,...
RAY BRADBURY

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
RAY BRADBURY

Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It...
RAY BRADBURY

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on ...
RAY BRADBURY

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When...
RAY BRADBURY

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one...
RAY BRADBURY

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
RAY BRADBURY

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened...
RAY BRADBURY

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself wa...
RAY BRADBURY

Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."
"Oh, they don't miss me," she ...
RAY BRADBURY

Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"...
RAY BRADBURY

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
RAY BRADBURY

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape he...
RAY BRADBURY

God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see ...
RAY BRADBURY

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, th...
RAY BRADBURY

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ours...
RAY BRADBURY

Life is trying things to see if they work.
RAY BRADBURY

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.
RAY BRADBURY

And now, these books. This. He touched PHYSIOGNOMONIE. The secrets of the individual's character as ...
RAY BRADBURY

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I s...
RAY BRADBURY

I love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find somethi...
RAY BRADBURY

My stories run up and bite me in the leg -- I respond by writing them down - everything that goes on...
RAY BRADBURY

Richard Bach with this book does two things. He gives me Flight. He makes me Young. For both I am de...
RAY BRADBURY

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd n...
RAY BRADBURY

First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
RAY BRADBURY

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the histo...
RAY BRADBURY

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher.
Space travel has again made children of u...
RAY BRADBURY

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down
RAY BRADBURY

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true -- hard work pays off. If you want to ...
RAY BRADBURY

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every nigh...
RAY BRADBURY

When I was a young man, I didn't think about having a family. My wife and I were too poor to have ba...
RAY BRADBURY

A good night's sleep, or a ten-minute brawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together...
RAY BRADBURY

You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to lov...
RAY BRADBURY

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd n...
RAY BRADBURY

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The...
RAY BRADBURY

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
RAY BRADBURY

We're all fools...all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool ...
RAY BRADBURY

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a paint...
RAY BRADBURY

Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon. Not theories, however. ...
RAY BRADBURY

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people r...
RAY BRADBURY

Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's mor...
RAY BRADBURY

We are all cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves ove...
RAY BRADBURY

So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.
RAY BRADBURY

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. ...
RAY BRADBURY

Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you to k...
RAY BRADBURY

There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows any...
RAY BRADBURY

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship...
RAY BRADBURY

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I...
RAY BRADBURY

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machi...
RAY BRADBURY

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc g...
RAY BRADBURY

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and wi...
RAY BRADBURY

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that.
RAY BRADBURY

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
RAY BRADBURY

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.
RAY BRADBURY

I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one sh...
RAY BRADBURY

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better t...
RAY BRADBURY

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occas...
RAY BRADBURY

My goal is to entertain myself and others.
RAY BRADBURY

Look at the Chandra Levy case. It's become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable network...
RAY BRADBURY

Everything is generated through your own will power.
RAY BRADBURY

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word...
RAY BRADBURY

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
RAY BRADBURY

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you w...
RAY BRADBURY

If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.
RAY BRADBURY

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to u...
RAY BRADBURY

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
RAY BRADBURY

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over an...
RAY BRADBURY

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
RAY BRADBURY

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
RAY BRADBURY

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.
RAY BRADBURY

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people...
RAY BRADBURY

I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.
RAY BRADBURY

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.
RAY BRADBURY

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.
RAY BRADBURY

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-con...
RAY BRADBURY

Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the bigges...
RAY BRADBURY

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but ...
RAY BRADBURY

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did y...
RAY BRADBURY

You're insane!"
"I won't argue that point.
RAY BRADBURY

Fire is bright and fire is clean.
RAY BRADBURY

I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn'...
RAY BRADBURY

That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and t...
RAY BRADBURY

How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone wan...
RAY BRADBURY

If you are going to describe the history of animation, you'd look at the early Disney work, then...
RAY BRADBURY

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn't exist. TV didn't exist...
RAY BRADBURY

I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I ...
RAY BRADBURY

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did...
RAY BRADBURY

That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always...
RAY BRADBURY

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells li...
RAY BRADBURY

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ...
RAY BRADBURY

But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.
RAY BRADBURY

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices...
RAY BRADBURY

It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blacken...
RAY BRADBURY

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in fo...
RAY BRADBURY

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, 'Do this, do that,...
RAY BRADBURY

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
RAY BRADBURY

For these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where...
RAY BRADBURY

Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't di...
RAY BRADBURY

Nobody moved.

Everybody sat in the dark cellar, suspended in the suddenly frozen task of ...
RAY BRADBURY

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.
RAY BRADBURY

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and s...
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...
RAY BRADBURY

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future
RAY BRADBURY

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe
RAY BRADBURY

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be lik...
RAY BRADBURY

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But one strang...
RAY BRADBURY

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he ...
RAY BRADBURY

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
RAY BRADBURY

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious i...
RAY BRADBURY

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with ...
RAY BRADBURY

I was one of Them: the Strange Ones. The Funny People. The Odd Tribes of autograph collectors and ph...
RAY BRADBURY

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; gi...
RAY BRADBURY

Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's m...
RAY BRADBURY

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I s...
RAY BRADBURY

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's ...
RAY BRADBURY

It's lack that gives us inspiration. It's not fullness.
RAY BRADBURY

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.
RAY BRADBURY

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testa...
RAY BRADBURY

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act craz...
RAY BRADBURY

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.
RAY BRADBURY

Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throa...
RAY BRADBURY

What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his ...
RAY BRADBURY

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-litera...
RAY BRADBURY

Who are your friends? Do they believe in you? Or do they stunt your growth with ridicule and disbeli...
RAY BRADBURY

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy o...
RAY BRADBURY

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time en...
RAY BRADBURY

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when tr...
RAY BRADBURY

We never sit anything out. We are cups, quietly and constantly being filled. The trick is knowing ho...
RAY BRADBURY

And metaphors like cats behind your smile,
Each one wound up to purr,
each one a pride, RAY BRADBURY

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe
RAY BRADBURY

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

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often e...
RAY BRADBURY

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
RAY BRADBURY

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

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth
RAY BRADBURY

We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fi...
RAY BRADBURY

Write. Don't think. Relax.
RAY BRADBURY

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and th...
RAY BRADBURY

What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to ...
RAY BRADBURY

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to i...
RAY BRADBURY

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your be...
RAY BRADBURY

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
RAY BRADBURY

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit ma...
RAY BRADBURY

Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life?

See Istanbu...
RAY BRADBURY

Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them wh...
RAY BRADBURY

You'll be found, your nickels, dimes and Indian-heads fused by electroplating. Abe Lincolns melted i...
RAY BRADBURY

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.
RAY BRADBURY

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like...
RAY BRADBURY

Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's...
RAY BRADBURY

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers alwa...
RAY BRADBURY

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
RAY BRADBURY

Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw t...
RAY BRADBURY

Sunsets are loved because they vanish.

Flowers are loved because they go.

The ...
RAY BRADBURY

Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore ...
RAY BRADBURY

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.
RAY BRADBURY

Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away."
"But, Lena, that's sad." RAY BRADBURY

No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.
RAY BRADBURY

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down...
RAY BRADBURY

The things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love should be things tha...
RAY BRADBURY

I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits ...
RAY BRADBURY

When I was a boy in the midwest I used to go out and look at the stars at night and wonder about the...
RAY BRADBURY

There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a ...
RAY BRADBURY

Le cose che voi cercate, Montag, sono su questa terra, ma il solo modo per cui l’uomo medio potrà...
RAY BRADBURY

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still wr...
RAY BRADBURY

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind ...
RAY BRADBURY

First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
RAY BRADBURY

I have two rules in life - to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done.
RAY BRADBURY

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is ...
RAY BRADBURY

Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. ...
RAY BRADBURY

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, i...
RAY BRADBURY

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I...
RAY BRADBURY

I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't hav...
RAY BRADBURY

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned ...
RAY BRADBURY

One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shor...
RAY BRADBURY

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially,...
RAY BRADBURY

We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we'v...
RAY BRADBURY

I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.
RAY BRADBURY

That's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doi...
RAY BRADBURY

The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.
RAY BRADBURY

There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with Go...
RAY BRADBURY

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born tha...
RAY BRADBURY

Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow hi...
RAY BRADBURY

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or on...
RAY BRADBURY

If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd ne...
RAY BRADBURY

Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow hi...
RAY BRADBURY

Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you?
RAY BRADBURY

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
RAY BRADBURY

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers ...
RAY BRADBURY

You fail only if you stop writing
RAY BRADBURY

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious...
RAY BRADBURY

Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?

Ray Bradbury

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