Ray Bradbury Quotes

353 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

Ray Bradbury
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
You should read in your own field only when you're young. When I was 8, 10, 12, 16, 25, I read science fiction. But then I went on to Alexander Pope and John Donne and Moliere to mix it up.

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
Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you're twenty.

Ray Bradbury
Man warring on himself an old tale is;
But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow in himself,
Finding his left hand and his right
Are similar sons, are children fighting
In the porchyards of the void?!

Ray Bradbury