You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Reading, Books
Without libraries what have we?. We have no past and no future.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Libraries
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
—Ray Bradbury
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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Television
Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: America
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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Writing
I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: The Future, Future
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
Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Travel
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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Feelings
Richard Bach with this book does two things. He gives meFlight. He makes me Young. For both I am deeply grateful.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Authors & Writing
First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Fear
Chock them so … 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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Information
Sometimes you’ve got to jump off cliffs and grow wings on the way down.
—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 babies. Then all of a sudden, one came along and scared the hell out of us because we had no money. Once the baby arrives, you make do somehow. You fall in love with the baby and life adjusts itself. You find you don’t need as much money as you thought. When that happens, you can ask the questions that should have come before the baby.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Parenting
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
—Ray Bradbury
A good night’s sleep, or a ten-minute brawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Medicine
The point is obvious. 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/Seventhday Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor whosees 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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Censorship
You can make yourself happy or miserable – it’s the same amount of effort.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Happiness
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
It is good to renew one’s wonder, said the philosopher.
Space travel has again made children of us all.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Space
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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Miracles
Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall
—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 today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Growth
Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.
—Ray Bradbury
Life is “trying things to see if they work.”
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Life
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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Creativity
I love writing, it’s the center of my life. If you don’t love what you do, you’d better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don’t have a reason for living.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Authors & Writing
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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Adventure, Wonder
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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Thinking, Thought
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- Ursula K. Le Guin Science-fiction writer
- Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
- Philip K. Dick American Novelist
- Orson Scott Card American Author
- William S. Burroughs American Novelist
- Lois McMaster Bujold American Novelist
- Stephen King American Novelist
- John D. MacDonald American Novelist
- Brian Aldiss English Novelist
Leave a Reply