Ray Bradbury Quotes

353 Sourced Quotes

Any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don't build a story; you allow it to explode.

Ray Bradbury
I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

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
Everyone has a telephone. Whether they can afford it or not. It's one of those things that people have, regardless of their income.

Ray Bradbury
I write all of my novels and stories, as you have seen, in a great surge of delightful passion. Only recently, glancing at the novel, I realized that Montag is named after a paper manufacturing company. And Faber, of course, is a maker of pencils! What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus. And not tell me!

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

Ray Bradbury
Here at this far lost end of the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with them....

Ray Bradbury
My stories are warnings; they're not predictions. If they were predictions, I wouldn't do them. Because then I'd be part of the doom-ridden psychology. But every time I name a problem, I try to give a solution.

Ray Bradbury
I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

Ray Bradbury
Theories are invigorating and tonic. Give me an ounce of fact and I will produce you a ton of theory by tea this afternoon.

Ray Bradbury
We live in miracles which cannot be explained. The scientist, the theologian, the artist — each attempts impossible explanations.

Ray Bradbury
The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.

Ray Bradbury
And the lesson was this; sit in the sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in a flickery light, or open light, and the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time, bringing rain, and the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you full.

Ray Bradbury
In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Ray Bradbury
"The mysteries of the sea," said McDunn thoughtfully. "You know, the ocean's the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colors, not two alike. Strange."

Ray Bradbury
One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more...

Ray Bradbury
And some days, he went on, were days of hearing every trump and trill of the universe. Some days were good for tasting and some for touching. And some days were good for all the senses at once. This day now, he nodded, smelled as if a great and nameless orchard had grown up overnight beyond the hills to fill the entire visible land with its warm freshness. The air felt like rain, but there were no clouds.

Ray Bradbury
They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won't run on. They don't know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it'll have to hit.

Ray Bradbury
How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt?

Ray Bradbury
Most of my stories are ideas in action. In other words, I get a concept, and I let it run away. I find a character to act out the idea. And then the story takes care of itself.

Ray Bradbury
We are all... children of this universe. Not just Earth, or Mars, or this System, but the whole grand fireworks. And if we are interested in Mars at all, it is only because we wonder over our past and worry terribly about our possible future.

Ray Bradbury
You should love literature. You should live in the library. Forget about films.

Ray Bradbury
I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

Ray Bradbury
I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can't do that on a computer.

Ray Bradbury
The whole concept of higher education is negated unless the sole criterion used to determine if students qualify is the grades they score on standardized tests. Education is purely an issue of learning - we can no longer afford to have it polluted by damn politics. Leave pollution up to the politicians

Ray Bradbury
Hollywood was a good influence because I was madly in love with films, and the films had a direct influence on me.

Ray Bradbury
I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.

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 problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind.

Ray Bradbury
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury