Ray Bradbury Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there was it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away.

Ray Bradbury
Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye.

Ray Bradbury
You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You're one of the few who put up with me. That's why I think it's so strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you, somehow.

Ray Bradbury
The universe is full of matter and force. Yet in all that force, amongst all the bulks and gravities, the rains of cosmic light, the bombardment of energy — how little spirit, how small the decimal points of intelligence.

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

Ray Bradbury
There are a lot of wonderful women writers who would be good influences on writers. You've got to spread yourself out and educate yourself with all kinds of stories.

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
Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

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
Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?

Ray Bradbury
I've done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done to me. I took the bottom out of her life.

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

Ray Bradbury
Montag, you're looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the "guilty," but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.

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

Ray Bradbury
We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

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
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
How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.

Ray Bradbury
My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

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

Ray Bradbury
New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven't had to live like that. I'm a California boy. I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

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