Ray Bradbury Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.

Ray Bradbury
Passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.

Ray Bradbury
I write all the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I'm going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me. When they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and trap them before they're gone. That's the whole secret: to do things that excite you.

Ray Bradbury
My stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg—I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bit. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Ray Bradbury
Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

Ray Bradbury
When I was 16, I saw six people die horribly in an accident. I walked home holding on to walls and trees. It took me months to begin to function again. So I don't drive. But whether I drive or not is irrelevant. The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society — cars kill more than wars do. More than 50,000 people will die this year because of them and nobody seems to notice.

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
All flesh is one: what matter scores;
Or color of the suit
Or if the helmet glints with blue or gold?
All is one bold achievement,
All is fine spring-found-again-in-autumn day
When juices run in antelopes along our blood, And green our flag, forever green…

Ray Bradbury
The way to teach in this world is to pretend you're not teaching. Science fiction offers the chance to pretend to look the other way while teaching. Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.

Ray Bradbury
Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.

Ray Bradbury
Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.

Ray Bradbury
The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.

Ray Bradbury
Dad," said Will, his voice very faint. "Are you a good person?" "To you and your mother, yes, I try. But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime, Will. I know everything worth knowing about myself-" "And, adding it all up...?" "The sum? As they come and go, and I mostly sit very still and tight, yes, I'm all right.

Ray Bradbury
Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.

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
Television, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

Ray Bradbury
Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.

Ray Bradbury
It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.

Ray Bradbury
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.

Ray Bradbury
A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it.

Ray Bradbury
Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

Ray Bradbury
I have never had a dry spell in my life because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

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

Ray Bradbury
How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.

Ray Bradbury
The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it.

Ray Bradbury