Ray Bradbury Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

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
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