Ray Douglas Bradbury (b.1920) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury’s works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.
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You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.
—Ray Bradbury
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
—Ray Bradbury
First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Fear
It doesn’t matter what you do…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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: God
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.
—Ray Bradbury
And now, these books. This. He touched PHYSIOGNOMONIE. The secrets of the individual’s character as found on his face. Were Jim and Will, then, featured all angelic, pure, half-innocent, peering up through the sidewalk at marching terror? Did the boys represent the ideal for your Woman, Man, or Child of Excellent Bearing, Color, Balance, and Summer Disposition?
Converserly…Charles Halloway turned a page…did the scurrying freaks, the Illustrated Marvel, bear the foreheads of the Irascible, the Cruel, the Covetous, the mouths of the Lewd and Untruthful? the teeth of the Crafty, the Unstable, the Audacious, the Vainglorious, and your Marvelous Beast?
No. The book slipped shut. If faces were judged, the freaks were no worse than many he’d been slipping from the liberty late nights in his long career.
There was only one thing sure.
Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension:
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
So vague yet so immense.
He did not want to live with it.
Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it for all the rest of his life.
At the window he looked out and thought Jim, Will, are you coming? will you get here?
Waiting, his flesh took paleness from his bones.
—Ray Bradbury
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.
—Ray Bradbury
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