Ray Bradbury Quotes

“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.”

— Ray Bradbury

“I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.”

— Ray Bradbury

The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. 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 headed for shore.

— Ray Bradbury

“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

“A book is a loaded gun.”

— Ray Bradbury

“The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it ... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane ... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevard? ... I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly ... If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He'd say, that's grass! A pink blur! That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

— Ray Bradbury

“I've always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It's essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don't know. I only know there has been your mind here and my mind here, and the afternoons have been like none I can remember.”

— Ray Bradbury

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned 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. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

— Ray Bradbury

“We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.”

— Ray Bradbury

Olding a book but reading the empty spaces.

— 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

“It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn't so much wilderness around you couldn't see the town. But on the other hand there wasn't so much town you couldn't see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness. The town was full of trees. And dry grass and dead flowers now that autumn was here. And full of fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on and a large ravine to tumble in and yell across. And the town was full of ...
Boys.
And it was the afternoon of Halloween.
And all the houses shut against a cool wind.
And the town was full of cold sunlight.
But suddenly, the day was gone.
Night came out from under each tree and spread.”

— Ray Bradbury

Beware the autumn people

— Ray Bradbury

“Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. 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 some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating, by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer's make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road he wants to go. I would only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.”

— Ray Bradbury

“We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.”

— Ray Bradbury

“The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.”

— Ray Bradbury

“I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had the strength to rouse up, you'd slaughter your half-dreams with a buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that's burned dry.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Someone who loved night arrivals and dark departures, for the hell, the fun, the death of it?”

— Ray Bradbury

“He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.
But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting?
He turned the corner.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.”

— 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

“Feel," said Driscoll, his hands and arms out loosely. "Remember how you used to run when you were a kid, and how the wind felt. Like feathers on your arms. You ran and thought any minute you'd fly, but you never quite did.”

— Ray Bradbury

Empty the theaters save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colors running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne.

— Ray Bradbury

“We won't ruin Mars," said the captain. "It's too big and too good." "You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn't set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Rubens! All bosom and bum, big cumulus clouds of pink flesh, eh? You can feel the heart beating like a kettledrum in a ton of that stuff. Every woman a bed; throw yourself on them, sink from sight.”

— Ray Bradbury

“And when the war's over, someday, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we'll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But 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 doing.”

— Ray Bradbury

“At the very moment Mrs. Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wine-glasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun. (Season of Disbelief)”

— Ray Bradbury

In most cases I don't even know the metaphors lay waiting to be printed off my retina.

— Ray Bradbury

“Look for bees," said Father. "Bees hang around grapes like boys around kitchens, Doug?”

— Ray Bradbury

“Ye gods and fishes, lad, every town has its resident witch. Every town hides some old Greek pagan priest, some Roman worshipper of tiny gods who ran up the roads, hid in culverts, sank in caves to escape the Christians! In every tiny village, boy, in every scrubby farm the old religions hide out ... all the little lollygaggin' cults, all flavors and types, scramble to survive. See how they run, boys!”

— Ray Bradbury

I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.

— Ray Bradbury

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

— Ray Bradbury

“Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.”

— Ray Bradbury

I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count.

— Ray Bradbury

I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

— Ray Bradbury

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

— Ray Bradbury

“As a result of reading science fiction when I was eight, I grew up with an interest in music, architecture, city planning, transportation, politics, ethics, aesthetics on any level, art ... it's just total! It's a complete commitment to the whole human race on all the Earth. That's what science fiction is about.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.”

— Ray Bradbury

“The critics are generally wrong, or they're fifteen, twenty years late. It's a great shame. They miss out on a lot.”

— Ray Bradbury

“For about 150 days a year in Venice, the sun doesn't show through the mist until noon.”

— Ray Bradbury

“What church could compete with the fireworks of the pure soul?”

— Ray Bradbury

“Heaven is a house with porch lights.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Every day is Christmas Day to a dog.”

— 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