Top 100 Ray Bradbury Quotes
#1. We're going to become the martians when we land there. When we explore and build communities, we become the martians. That's a wonderful destiny for all of us.
Ray Bradbury
#2. 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 the doing.
Ray Bradbury
#3. Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading.
Ray Bradbury
#5. Congratulations.'
'For what? Breathing? That's a habit, not a virtue.
Ray Bradbury
#6. You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to think what
I've asked you.
Ray Bradbury
#7. Isn't this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.
Ray Bradbury
#9. You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!
Ray Bradbury
#10. Perhaps I expected to look in and find a giant canary, stretched out on a carpet of dust, songless, capable of only heart murmurs for talk.
Ray Bradbury
#11. She was beginning to shriek now, sitting there like a wax doll melting in its own heat.
Ray Bradbury
#12. Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.
Ray Bradbury
#13. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?
Ray Bradbury
#14. ..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.
Ray Bradbury
#15. He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.
Ray Bradbury
#16. When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.
Ray Bradbury
#17. Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but perfume to me.
Ray Bradbury
#18. it's just how you look at it, Charlie. Things are what you want them to be.
Ray Bradbury
#19. She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burnt her.
Ray Bradbury
#20. Who are your friends? Do they believe in you? Or do they stunt your growth with ridicule and disbelief? If the latter, you haven't friends. Go find some.
Ray Bradbury
#21. Life shoould be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at other move forward with it.
Ray Bradbury
#22. Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.
Ray Bradbury
#23. I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.
Ray Bradbury
#24. I never thought of God as humorous," said Father Stone. "The Creator of the platypus, the camel, the ostrich, and man? Oh, come now!
Ray Bradbury
#25. You feed yourself. Make sure you have all the information, whether it's aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, I don't care what it is. Then you walk away from it and let it ferment. You ignore it and pretend you don't care. Next thing you know, the answer comes.
Ray Bradbury
#26. It doesn't have to be the greatest but it does have to be you.
Ray Bradbury
#28. Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.
Ray Bradbury
#29. 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
#30. Sometimes I'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way?
Ray Bradbury
#31. Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"
He laughed. "That's against the law!"
"Oh. Of course.
Ray Bradbury
#32. It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book ... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt ...
Ray Bradbury
#33. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.
Ray Bradbury
#34. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood.
Ray Bradbury
#35. There it sat, perfect as a fresh-laid egg on the dead sea bottom, the only nucleus of light and warmth in hundreds of miles of lonely wasteland. It was like a heart beating alone in a great dark body. He felt almost sorrowful with pride, gazing at it with wet eyes.
Ray Bradbury
#37. You let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting it, you relive it.
Ray Bradbury
#38. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are.
Ray Bradbury
#39. He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in the darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make flesh that holds fast and binds eternity.
Ray Bradbury
#40. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break eggs at the smaller end.
Ray Bradbury
#41. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead
Ray Bradbury
#42. My heart stopped talking because it didn't want to talk anymore for a while.
Ray Bradbury
#43. When a man talks from the heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.
Ray Bradbury
#44. If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.
Ray Bradbury
#45. She was too wonderful a character to be allowed to die and I realize now that I should have allowed her to appear at hte end of my book. [Ray writes about the character Clarisse]
Ray Bradbury
#46. They peered at him with their shining honey warm molasses-brown eyes. Their smiles, the white smiles pinned to their faces, were wide as all of summer.
Ray Bradbury
#47. We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks...And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me.
Ray Bradbury
#48. I have three rules to live by: Get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin, and when all else fails, run like hell.
Ray Bradbury
#49. It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.
Ray Bradbury
#50. So the carnival steams by, shakes ANY tree: it rains jackasses.
Ray Bradbury
#51. No," moaned Tom in despair. "School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer's even over! Ruin half the vacation!
Ray Bradbury
#52. The cat came first, in order to be absolute first. It arrived when all the cribs and closets and cellar bins and attic hang-spaces still needed October wings, autumn breathings, and fiery eyes.
Ray Bradbury
#53. And, after all, isn't that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people's heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that's how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.
Ray Bradbury
#54. Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.
Ray Bradbury
#55. That's sad," said Montag, quietly,(referring to The Hound) "because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know.
Ray Bradbury
#56. Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Ray Bradbury
#57. The sun rose yellow as a lemon.
The sky was round and blue.
The birds looped clear water songs in the air.
Will and Jim leaned from their windows.
Nothing had changed.
Except the look in Jim's eyes.
"Last night ... " said Will. "Did or didn't it happen?
Ray Bradbury
#58. Sure, it's money runs the world," Doone agreed, seated there. "But it is music that holds down the friction.
Ray Bradbury
#59. The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.
Ray Bradbury
#60. So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.
Ray Bradbury
#61. Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.
Ray Bradbury
#64. A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time," she said. "I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. ("Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")
Ray Bradbury
#65. School busses ... Won't even give us a chance to be late for school ... Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare,Doug, just think it all over.
Ray Bradbury
#66. Don't listen," whispered Faber. "He's trying to confuse. He's slippery. Watch out.
Ray Bradbury
#67. His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.
Ray Bradbury
#68. I don't write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn't set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.
Ray Bradbury
#70. I'm the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It's just the opposite of love.
Ray Bradbury
#71. There's a lot of crap out there. Most of the science fiction films alone are abominations, you know. They're mindless. So you can't learn from those kinds of films.
Ray Bradbury
#73. You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
Ray Bradbury
#74. It is a subliminal thing. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.
Ray Bradbury
#75. We're a free society; we've got television. We have radio. We have newspapers. We have the videocassette, which is coming into play. These are new freedoms.
Ray Bradbury
#76. They want to know what I do with all my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running.
Ray Bradbury
#77. If she fell, if she broke, you'd find a million fragments in the morning. Bright crystal and clear wine on the parquet flooring, that's all you'd see at dawn.
Ray Bradbury
#78. All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.
Ray Bradbury
#79. You've been put on the world to love the act of being alive.
Ray Bradbury
#81. Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky.
Ray Bradbury
#82. Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.
Ray Bradbury
#83. They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they're fascinated with the snake-pit.
Ray Bradbury
#84. I'm inclined to believe you need the psychiatrist.
Ray Bradbury
#85. You're a fool, a damn fool, an awful fool, an idiot, an awful idiot, a damn idiot, and a fool, a damn fool
Ray Bradbury
#86. We lived longer but at a price. We had to be our own children, having none.
Ray Bradbury
#87. People die every day, psychologically speaking. Some part of them gets tired. And that small part tries to kill off the entire person.
Ray Bradbury
#88. The real fear isn't rejection, but that there won't be enough time in your life to write all the stories that you have in you.
Ray Bradbury
#89. Each of the men I have listed seized a bit of the quicksilver of life, froze it for all time and turned, in the blaze of their creativity, to point at it and cry, "Isn't this good!" And it was good.
Ray Bradbury
#90. 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
#91. It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.
Ray Bradbury
#92. This is the kind of life I've had. Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle, as an Irish police report once put it. Drunk with life, that is, and not knowing where off to next. But you're on your way before dawn. And the trip? Exactly one half terror, exactly one half exhilaration.
Ray Bradbury
#93. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
Ray Bradbury
#94. Don't try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
Ray Bradbury
#95. The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so.
Ray Bradbury
#96. Their hands slapped library door handles together, their chests broke track tapes together, their tennis shoes beat parallel pony tracks over lawns, trimmed bushes, squirreled trees, no one losing, both winning, thus saving their friendship for other times of loss.
Ray Bradbury
#97. I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.
Ray Bradbury
#98. I am a passionate, not an intellectual writer, which means my characters must plunge ahead of me to live the story
Ray Bradbury
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
