Ray Bradbury Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

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

Ray Bradbury
I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don't publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don't you have a novel?

Ray Bradbury
I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head. And all these voices talk and when they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they're gone.

Ray Bradbury
I don't care what the science fiction trade technicians say, either. They are furious that I get away with murder. I use a scientific idea as a platform to leap into the air and never come back. This keeps them angry at me. They still begrudge my putting an atmosphere on Mars in The Martian Chronicles more than 40 years ago.

Ray Bradbury
The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.

Ray Bradbury
I've alway known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It's essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don't know.

Ray Bradbury
He says I'm a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers.

Ray Bradbury
He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out.

Ray Bradbury
The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar;
A moment terrible to hear.

Ray Bradbury
Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

Ray Bradbury
They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale.

Ray Bradbury
Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another.

Ray Bradbury
The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

Ray Bradbury
I'm really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember!

Ray Bradbury
We should be back on the moon right now. And we should be going off to Mars immediately. … How come we're looking at our shoes instead of at the great nebula in Orion? Where did we mislay the moon and back off from Mars? The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads.

Ray Bradbury
Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Ray Bradbury
We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.

Ray Bradbury
I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

Ray Bradbury
I believe the universe created us — we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious.

Ray Bradbury
I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

Ray Bradbury
I mean, you don't just love people, you must LOVE them with exclamation points.

Ray Bradbury
Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.

Ray Bradbury
I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

Ray Bradbury
He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.

Ray Bradbury
On my seventieth birthday, when I reflected that so many of my friends were dead or dying, it hit me that it was high time I got more work done. Ever since that time, I have done the active, smart thing by increasing my productivity. I'm not on the rocks or shoals yet, but the last few years have been a devastation of illnesses and deaths of many good friends. [Star Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry was a loss that deeply grieved me.

Ray Bradbury
Here a human without a car is a samurai without his sword. I would replace cars wherever possible with buses, monorails, rapid trains — whatever is takes to make pedestrians the center of our society again, and cities worthwhile enough for pedestrians to live in. I don't care what people do with their cars, as long as they give them up three quarters of the time — roughly the amount of time people spend every week superfluously driving places they don't want to go to visit people who don't want to see them.

Ray Bradbury
Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.

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
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
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