Ray Bradbury Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn't quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.

Ray Bradbury
So in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do, depending on the season and the need.

Ray Bradbury
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.

Ray Bradbury
And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...

Ray Bradbury
Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?

Ray Bradbury
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

Ray Bradbury
It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

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
They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

Ray Bradbury
I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it's really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us.

Ray Bradbury
We meet on the common ground of an uncommon age and share out our gifts of dark and light, good and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow.

Ray Bradbury
Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.

Ray Bradbury
With school 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. You always dread the unfamiliar.

Ray Bradbury
He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

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
All the sadder that Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past.

Ray Bradbury
Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.

Ray Bradbury
Man does not need escape so much as he needs release into a new spirit, a transcendent knowledge of himself that only Space can give him.

Ray Bradbury
Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take ares each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.

Ray Bradbury
The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

Ray Bradbury
Beware, Charlie, old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.

Ray Bradbury
All silence is.
All emptiness.
And now:
The dawn.

Ray Bradbury
If you're reluctant to weep, you won't live a full and complete life.

Ray Bradbury
At the center of religion is love. I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love.

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