Ray Bradbury Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense.

Ray Bradbury
In that film Love Story, there's a line, Love means never having to say you're sorry. That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you're sorry every day for some little thing or other.

Ray Bradbury
That's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and WORTH the doing.

Ray Bradbury
Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

Ray Bradbury
The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.

Ray Bradbury
I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly.

Ray Bradbury
When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life — that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.

Ray Bradbury
You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it.

Ray Bradbury
All the sadder that Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past.

Ray Bradbury
Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.

Ray Bradbury
Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can't explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. … If I'd found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I'd have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I'm glad Kurt Vonnegut didn't like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn't see the world the way I see it. I suppose I'm too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past — a combination of both. But I don't think I'm too overoptimistic.

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
More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it's too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing, a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and—irritable murder.

Ray Bradbury
Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?

Ray Bradbury
People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.

Ray Bradbury
Timothy looked at the deep ocean sky, trying to see Earth and the war and the ruined cities and the men killing each other since the day he was born. But he saw nothing. The war was as removed and far off as two flies battling to the death in the arch of a great high and silent cathedral. And just as senseless...
What are you looking at so hard, Dad?
I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace, and responsibility.
All that up there?
No. I didn't find it. It's not there any more. Maybe it'll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it was ever there.

Ray Bradbury
I'm not afraid. When you live as long as I've lived, you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I'd never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can't say I'm greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don't fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it.

Ray Bradbury
As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn't quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.

Ray Bradbury
The train skimmed on softly, slithering, black pennants fluttering, black confetti lost on its own sick-sweet candy wind, down the hill, with the two boys pursuing, the air was so cold they ate ice cream with each breath.

Ray Bradbury
God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.

Ray Bradbury
Summertime, 1950, I recognized Isherwood browsing in a Santa Monica bookstore. My book had just come out, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf, signed it and gave it to him. His face fell and my heart sank, but two days later he called and said, "Do you know what you've done?" I asked, "What?" And he simply told me to read his review in the Times. His rave turned my life around; the book immediately made the best-seller lists and has been in print ever since.
He was very kind in introducing me to various people he thought I should know, like Aldous Huxley, who had been my literary hero since Brave New World came out.

Ray Bradbury
Why have you been so blind?
Why have you never seen?
The slave and master in one skin
Is all your history, no more, no less
Confess! This is what you've been.

Ray Bradbury
If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

Ray Bradbury
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar.

Ray Bradbury
I don't know, he admitted.
Well. She started pouring tea. To start things off, what do you think of the world?
I don't know anything.
The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.
You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years.
It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it's an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn't life a play? Don't I play it well?
They both laughed quietly.

Ray Bradbury
Halloween. Sly does it. Tiptoe catspaws. Slide and creep. But why? What for? How? Who? When! Where did it all begin? 'You don't know, do you?' asks Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud climbing out under the pile of leaves under the Halloween Tree. 'You don't really know!'

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

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

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