Ray Bradbury - Life Quotes

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The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.

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
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
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
He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

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
People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

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
War!
The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.
But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting and killing?

Ray Bradbury
In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Ray Bradbury
My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don't schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

Ray Bradbury
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Ray Bradbury
The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.

Ray Bradbury
At the center of religion is love. I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love.

Ray Bradbury
The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.

Ray Bradbury
The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

Ray Bradbury
If you're reluctant to weep, you won't live a full and complete life.

Ray Bradbury
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Ray Bradbury
Oh, said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. A man with wings.
That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn't afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him.

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
Nikos Kazantzakis says, Live forever. That's his social obligation. The Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. All of Dickens says live life at the top of your energy.

Ray Bradbury
Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.

Ray Bradbury
Do you ever wonder if—well, if there are people living on the third planet?' 'The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.

Ray Bradbury
If NASA's budgeters could be convinced that there are riches on Mars, we would explode overnight to stand on the rim of the Martian abyss. We need space for reasons we have not as yet discovered, and I don't mean Tupperware. … NASA feels it has to justify everything it does in practical terms.
And Tupperware was one of the many practical products that came out of space travel. NASA feels it has got to flimflam you to get you to spend money on space. That's B. S. We don't need that. Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.

Ray Bradbury
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
The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life.

Ray Bradbury
From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?

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
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
There is no reason to write pornography when your own sex life is good. Why waste time writing about it?

Ray Bradbury