Ray Bradbury Quotes

353 Sourced Quotes

You take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That's you [our son].

Ray Bradbury
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
The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.

Ray Bradbury
We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

Ray Bradbury
Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

Ray Bradbury
With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual," of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

Ray Bradbury
I'm the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It's just the opposite of love.

Ray Bradbury
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Ray Bradbury
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/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees 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
You remember winning, don't you? A battle won, somewhere?
No, said the old man, deep under. I don't remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War's never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.

Ray Bradbury
My favorite writers have been those who've said things well. I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman's character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say, How'd she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together? I was an intense student.

Ray Bradbury
I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.

Ray Bradbury
That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.

Ray Bradbury
I foresaw political correctness 43 years ago. … whereas back then I wrote about the tyranny of the majority, today I'd combine that with the tyranny of the minorities. These days, you have to be careful of both. They both want to control you. … I say to both bunches, Whether you're a majority or minority, bug off! To hell with anybody who wants to tell me what to write. Their society breaks down into subsections of minorities who then, in effect, burn books by banning them. All this political correctness that's rampant on campuses is B. S. You can't fool around with the dangerous notion of telling a university what to teach and what not to.

Ray Bradbury
You are the jailer and the jailed,
You the impaler and the one that your own
Million-fleshed self in dreams by night
do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill.

Ray Bradbury
Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school.

Ray Bradbury
That so much time was wasted in this pain.
Ten thousand years ago he might have let off down
To not return again!
A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;
The laughter sets him free.
A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.
The Fool is me!
And with one final shake of laughter
Breaks his bonds.
The nails fall skittering to marble floors.
And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle
As Man steps down in amiable wisdom
To give himself what no one else can give:
His liberty.

Ray Bradbury
You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

Ray Bradbury
I feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and I don't know what.

Ray Bradbury
Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

Ray Bradbury
Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings,
In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.

Ray Bradbury
Sandwich outdoors isn't a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.

Ray Bradbury
It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.

Ray Bradbury
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Ray Bradbury
We could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves — that's a real religious activity. That's what space travel can be — relating ourselves to the universe. … NASA is to blame — the entire government is to blame — and the end of the Cold War really pulled the plug, draining any passion that remained.

Ray Bradbury
But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority

Ray Bradbury
A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it.

Ray Bradbury
The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land.

Ray Bradbury
It will only take a minute, said Uncle Einar's sweet wife.
I refuse, he said. And that takes but a second.

Ray Bradbury
Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Ray Bradbury