Ray Bradbury Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.

Ray Bradbury
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
It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know Im drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe

Ray Bradbury
When I was 16, I saw six people die horribly in an accident. I walked home holding on to walls and trees. It took me months to begin to function again. So I don't drive. But whether I drive or not is irrelevant. The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society — cars kill more than wars do. More than 50,000 people will die this year because of them and nobody seems to notice.

Ray Bradbury
Who has more pockets than a magician? A boy. Whose pockets contain *more* than a magicians? A boy's.

Ray Bradbury
Suddenly the day was gone, night came out from under each tree and spread.

Ray Bradbury
I have never had a dry spell in my life because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Ray Bradbury
Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Ray Bradbury
Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

Ray Bradbury
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

Ray Bradbury
I don't understand writers who have to work at it. I like to play. I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.

Ray Bradbury
Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Ray Bradbury
Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

Ray Bradbury
People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

Ray Bradbury
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.

Ray Bradbury
Ten thousand times a million sons of sons move
Through one great and towering town
Wearing their wits, which means their laughter,
As their crown. Set free upon the earth
By simple gifts of knowing how mere mirth can cut the bonds
And pull the blood spikes out;
Their conversation shouts of "Fool!"

Ray Bradbury
To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes.

Ray Bradbury
Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid.

Ray Bradbury
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
You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

Ray Bradbury
I write fantasy. The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.

Ray Bradbury
Hello!" He said hello and then said, "What are you up to now?" "I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it. "I don't think I'd like that," he said. "You might if you tried." "I never have." She licked her lips. "Rain even tastes good." "What do you do, go around trying everything once?" he asked. "Sometimes twice.

Ray Bradbury
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
There they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.

Ray Bradbury
Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.

Ray Bradbury
I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.

Ray Bradbury
Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.

Ray Bradbury
You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do — and they don't. They have prejudices.

Ray Bradbury
The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.

Ray Bradbury
I don't believe in the anthropomorphic God. … I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.

Ray Bradbury