Top 100 Bradbury Quotes
#1. If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.
Ray Bradbury
#2. Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.
Ray Bradbury
#3. Savory ... that's a swell word. And Basil and Betel. Capsicum. Curry. All great. But Relish, now, Relish with a capital R. No argument, that' the best.
Ray Bradbury
#4. With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.
Ray Bradbury
#5. If you are going to describe the history of animation, you'd look at the early Disney work, then 'Bugs Bunny,' 'Road Runner' and other Warner Brothers theatrical productions. But when you got to 'Rocky and Bullwinkle,' you'd see they were unique: They assumed you had a brain in your head.
Ray Bradbury
#6. The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
Ray Bradbury
#7. Look at it this way, child, life is a magic show, or should be if people didn't go to sleep on each other. Always leave folks with a bit of mystery, son.
Ray Bradbury
#8. Live in the library, for Christ's sake! Don't live on your goddamn computers and the internet and all that crap. Go to the library!
Ray Bradbury
#9. Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.
Malcolm Bradbury
#10. People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.
Ray Bradbury
#11. Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.
Ray Bradbury
#12. Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
Ray Bradbury
#13. In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.
Ray Bradbury
#14. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Ray Bradbury
#15. We are gathered here at the end of what Bradbury called the October Country: a state of mind as much as it is a time. All the harvests are in, the frost is on the ground, there's mist in the crisp night air and it's time to tell ghost stories.
Neil Gaiman
#16. Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.
Ray Bradbury
#17. Do what you love and love what you do. Don't do anything for money. Everything should be for love.
Ray Bradbury
#18. I don't understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway. Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?
Ray Bradbury
#19. Jump and let's build our wings on the way down
Ray Bradbury
#20. Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?
Ray Bradbury
#21. Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal.
Ray Bradbury
#23. 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
#24. Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. Just ask Ray Bradbury.
Kami Garcia
#25. The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you're looking back ... well, it amounts to everything.
Ray Bradbury
#27. On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.
Malcolm Bradbury
#28. Men are men, unfortunately, no matter what their shape, and inclined to sin.
Ray Bradbury
#29. Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle.
Ray Bradbury
#30. 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
#31. Now, with the message sent, the words said, she wanted to call them back, to censor, to rearrange them, to make a prettier sentence, a fairer explanation of her soul.
Ray Bradbury
#33. You must never name the goal. You must never tell us the target you're hitting for. You must automatically go toward it without ever naming it.
Ray Bradbury
#34. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
Ray Bradbury
#35. 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
#36. I want your loves to be multiple. I don't want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it.
Ray Bradbury
#37. There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.
Ray Bradbury
#38. Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
Ray Bradbury
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.
Ray Bradbury
#42. And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning.
Ray Bradbury
#43. I'm ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don't watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you're doing and it's the first time, really.
Ray Bradbury
#44. Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
Ray Bradbury
#45. Who ever heard of a Martian not invading? Who!
Ray Bradbury
#46. Kill two birds with one stone, feed the homeless to the hungry.
Ray Bradbury
#47. When you're older you want to learn from other people.
Ray Bradbury
#48. Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's burnt his damn wings, he wonders why
Ray Bradbury
#49. I've noticed your hostility towards him ... I ought to have guessed you were friends.
Malcolm Bradbury
#50. The thing that makes me happy is that I know that on Mars, two hundred years from now, my books are going to be read. They'll be up on dead Mars with no atmosphere. And late at night, with a flashlight, some little boy is going to peek under the covers and read The Martian Chronicles on Mars.
Ray Bradbury
#51. If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.
Ray Bradbury
#52. I would guess that Ray Bradbury would be equally resentful of what they did with Illustrated Man, which, you know, took a central idea thesis of his and pissed all over it - made it into one of the worst movies ever made.
Rod Serling
#53. But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority
Ray Bradbury
#54. Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.
Ray Bradbury
#55. Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people.
Zack Snyder
#56. We haven't been too bad, have we?"
"No, nor enormously good. I suppose that's the trouble - we haven't been much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of awful things.
Ray Bradbury
#57. How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you?
Ray Bradbury
#58. Your mind's always juggling, isn't it?-mirrors, torches, plates.
Ray Bradbury
#59. But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime. I know everything worth knowing about myself--"
~Something Wicked This Way Comes
Ray Bradbury
#60. Ray Bradbury's definition of a book is at the end, when he points out that we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.) - Neil
Ray Bradbury
#61. Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.
Sam Weller
#63. Come on, get up, get up, you can't just sit! But he was still crying and that had to be finished.
Ray Bradbury
#65. It's always someone else's husband dies, they say
Ray Bradbury
#67. Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.
Ray Bradbury
#68. And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
Ray Bradbury
#70. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
Ray Bradbury
#71. Congratulations.'
'For what? Breathing? That's a habit, not a virtue.
Ray Bradbury
#72. Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."
Ray Bradbury
#73. What are you up to now?" "I'm sill crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.
Ray Bradbury
#74. 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
#75. While my favorite book of short stories is Fredrick Brown's 'Nightmares and Geezenstacks,' my favorite single story is 'Sound of Thunder,' by Ray Bradbury.
James Luceno
#76. Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.
Malcolm Bradbury
#77. That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.
Ray Bradbury
#78. It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.
Ray Bradbury
#79. The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society - cars kill more than wars do.
Ray Bradbury
#80. 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
#81. If Caribbean writers have one single unifying theme, it is a strong sense of place, and of home. There is also - always, beneath the humour, which is a West Indian characteristic - a sadness: an awareness of a past that can never really be forgotten, or forgiven.
Malcolm Bradbury
#82. Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.
Ray Bradbury
#83. You don't have to turn on the TV set. You don't have to work on the Internet. It's up to you.
Ray Bradbury
#84. Marriage, [ ... ], the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.
Malcolm Bradbury
#85. 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
#86. Captain Bradbury's right eyebrow had now become so closely entangled with his left that there seemed no hope of ever extricating it without the aid of powerful machinery.
P.G. Wodehouse
#87. I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago.
For a little while I'm not afraid.
Maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing at last.
Maybe it's because I've done a rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you.
Ray Bradbury
#88. The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they're done, not to worry about things ahead of time.
Ray Bradbury
#89. First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.
Ray Bradbury
#90. I take this continent with me into the grave.
Ray Bradbury
#91. The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
Ray Bradbury
#92. In your life, did you know enthusiasm?' If the answer is yes you enter the sky. If no, you fall to burn in the pit.
Ray Bradbury
#93. Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.
Ray Bradbury
#94. Maybe one reason so many people have so many problems is that there are so many other people with so many solutions." (Love on a Gunboat")
Malcolm Bradbury
#95. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.
Ray Bradbury
#96. Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time - And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.
Ray Bradbury
#99. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bed-sheets around corners.
Ray Bradbury
#100. If Blake said that, said Father Brian, he never lived in Dublin.
Ray Bradbury
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