Ray Bradbury - Books Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

View all Ray Bradbury Quotes
"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course."

Ray Bradbury
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury
I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

Ray Bradbury
The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

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

Ray Bradbury
Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

Ray Bradbury
I foresaw political correctness 43 years ago. … whereas back then I wrote about the tyranny of the majority, today I'd combine that with the tyranny of the minorities. These days, you have to be careful of both. They both want to control you. … I say to both bunches, Whether you're a majority or minority, bug off! To hell with anybody who wants to tell me what to write. Their society breaks down into subsections of minorities who then, in effect, burn books by banning them. All this political correctness that's rampant on campuses is B. S. You can't fool around with the dangerous notion of telling a university what to teach and what not to.

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
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
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

Ray Bradbury
Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

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
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.... Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

Ray Bradbury
You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

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

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
Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet."

Ray Bradbury
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind.

Ray Bradbury
Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.

Ray Bradbury
I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

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 rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!—when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?

Ray Bradbury
We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.

Ray Bradbury
They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

Ray Bradbury
Everyone must leave something in the room or left behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

Ray Bradbury
Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

Ray Bradbury
Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that I'm not responsible for any of this. It's from God. And I'm so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is at play in the fields of the Lord. It's been wonderful fun and I'll be damned where any of it came from. I've been fortunate. Very fortunate.

Ray Bradbury
There must be something in books, something we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.

Ray Bradbury
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Ray Bradbury
I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.

Ray Bradbury