Top 100 Bradbury's 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

Bradbury's Quotes #650
#2. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #2369
#3. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #9706
#4. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #20813
#5. Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #21894
#6. Jump and let's build our wings on the way down

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #24756
#7. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #29755
#8. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #43107
#9. There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #50258
#10. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #61011
#11. Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's burnt his damn wings, he wonders why

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #66537
#12. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #79440
#13. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #79750
#14. Your mind's always juggling, isn't it?-mirrors, torches, plates.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #86217
#15. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #87635
#16. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #88171
#17. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #88505
#18. no man's a hero to himself.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #88997
#19. It's always someone else's husband dies, they say

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #99255
#20. Congratulations.'
'For what? Breathing? That's a habit, not a virtue.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #108372
#21. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #108883
#22. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #113115
#23. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #113153
#24. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #116638
#25. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #130510
#26. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #134801
#27. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #136931
#28. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #138132
#29. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #158690
#30. How's Uncle Louis today?" "Who?" "And Aunt Maude?

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #159064
#31. That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #163415
#32. Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man's attitude when he has power.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #213294
#33. I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves
you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #238898
#34. Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn't that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There's all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #245767
#35. Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #253085
#36. Write 1000 words a day. That's only about four pages, but force yourself to do it. Put your finger down your throat and throw up. That's what writing's all about.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #274855
#37. Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, 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

Bradbury's Quotes #292759
#38. It's rare you get an idea from a dream. I can't really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I've ever had a dream that held up. They're much too dislocated

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #301515
#39. And the odd think in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #301520
#40. Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.

Malcolm Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #303950
#41. I suppose it's an unconscious little stream of wit that flows quietly under everything I do or say.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #318817
#42. Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?

Malcolm Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #324131
#43. I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.

Sam Weller

Bradbury's Quotes #335100
#44. Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning.'
He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable.
'And if you look' - she nodded at the sky - 'there's a man on the moon.'
He hadn't looked for a long time.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #346424
#45. it's just how you look at it, Charlie. Things are what you want them to be.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #352979
#46. Not about mean old nasty Mars, I tell you, mister! It's your type that is going to boil for years, and suffer and break out in black pimples and be tortured - "
"I must admit Earth isn't very nice. You've described it beautifully.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #383052
#47. One is congenitally a woman; one tries not to be, but it's a question of one's humanity.

Malcolm Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #386368
#48. Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #391720
#49. That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #399612
#50. Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #433859
#51. It's lack that gives us inspiration. It's not fullness.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #435608
#52. It's bad to get up early, stand at your typewriter and work, then find it's nothing and take a bottle to bed.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #442466
#53. Of course she's read it. Half of England has read it, which is why it's vulgar to quote it.' 'Half the world has read the Bible and we quote it.

Jennifer Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #447387
#54. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #449896
#55. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #451619
#56. The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in the windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #458425
#57. Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #461598
#58. A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am. But it burns with a high flame.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #475133
#59. Ray Bradbury has a vacation house in Palm Springs, California, in the desert at the base of the Santa Rosa mountains. It's a Rat Pack-era affair, with a chrome-and-turquoise kitchen and a small swimming pool in back.

Sam Weller

Bradbury's Quotes #477769
#60. I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eyes with wonder, ' he said, '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. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #486808
#61. His destiny is in his genes. He can no more ignore this call, this summons, than he can ignore the beating of his heart. So it is with Man's becoming more than he now is. Not Superman, assuredly, for that name has been contaminated with misuse. But a creature with a superb destiny.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #495782
#62. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #496228
#63. Who has more pockets than a magician?
A boy.
Whose pockets contain *more* than a magicians?
A boy's.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #497160
#64. When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #509890
#65. What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #520159
#66. We've let too much time go by. We've been busy with war instead of being busy with peace. And that's what space travel is all about. It's all about peace and exploration and wonder and beauty.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #532317
#67. All of the good, weird stories I've written are based on things I've dredged out of my subconscious. That's the real stuff. Everything else is fake.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #539558
#68. Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #546916
#69. Where strangers scanned each other's faces and found yesterday's sunrise instead of tomorrow's midnight.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #555082
#70. The Animal does not question lif. It lives. It's very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #557157
#71. I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.
[Writer's Digest Interview (Robert Jacobs, Writer's Digest, February 1976)]

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #558898
#72. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #564726
#73. Bradbury would have said his plots are myths and metaphors that tell stories about the human condition. That's what sets him apart from other science-fiction writers: He doesn't write about technology, but about the human heart and psyche.

Sam Weller

Bradbury's Quotes #567097
#74. I love the musical form of books. It's a different way of doing things, it's very beautiful. You're able to sing things instead of saying them. So what the heck - why not do them?

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #569312
#75. Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #576641
#76. Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #580193
#77. First grade is very cheap. It's the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don't do it right.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #581933
#78. Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"
He laughed. "That's against the law!"
"Oh. Of course.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #587799
#79. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #588955
#80. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #603625
#81. Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #609712
#82. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #621338
#83. I think of her hands but I don't see them doing anything at all. They just hang there at her sides or they lay there on her lap or there's a cigarette in them, but that's all.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #622779
#84. Fantasy? That's for the Fire Birds. Fantasy, even when it takes science-fictional forms, which it often does, is dangerous. It is escapist. It is daydreaming. It has nothing to do with the world and the world's problems.
So said the snobs who did not know themselves as snobs.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #636571
#85. A life's work should be based on love.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #642258
#86. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #646436
#87. Because of what I loved at 7, I still get jobs in my 60's. Guess who got the job? Crazy Ray.
Ray Bradbury

Sherri Rabinowitz

Bradbury's Quotes #657617
#88. Whatever she is now she's better than she was," said Bedloe. "Being dead is better than being dull, being dead is better than not being aware.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #671629
#89. I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #688758
#90. went to the Rock to hide my face And the Rock cried out, "No Hiding Place, There's no Hiding Place down here.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #721542
#91. It's just ... It's just, if I didn't see these windows until today, what else did I miss?

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #721904
#92. I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #726122
#93. Today we haved touched Mars. There is life on Mars, and it us us-extensions of our eyes in all directions, extensions of our mind, extensions of our heart and soul have touched Mars today. That's the message to look for there: We are on Mars. We are the Martians!

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #743553
#94. Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away."
"But, Lena, that's sad."
"No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #750361
#95. In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story - 'The Memory Erasers'.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Bradbury's Quotes #765221
#96. 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

Bradbury's Quotes #772199
#97. I don't see myself as a philosopher. That's awfully boring.

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #782825
#98. Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?'
'It's like having an operation,' said Treece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.

Malcolm Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #797909
#99. The numbness will go away, he thought. It'll take time, but I'll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that's gone. I'm lost without it

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's Quotes #801600
#100. Ray Bradbury's entire oeuvre exemplifies the crumbling of SCIENCE FICTION into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Hal Duncan

Bradbury's Quotes #830387

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