Top 816 Quotes & Sayings by Ray Bradbury - Page 3

I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money.

Libraries raised me.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

There's no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

I don't control my writing - it controls me.

When you're older you want to learn from other people.

First grade is very cheap. It's the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don't do it right.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

I don't do research. I never have.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.

Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.

(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?) Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

I don't believe in government. I hate politics. I'm against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Creativity is a continual surprise.

The local TV news is the greatest danger in your life. It's all crap.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

Television is very dangerous. Because it repeats and repeats and repeats our disasters, instead of our triumphs.

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

If we try to deny the darkness in our souls then we'll become completely dark.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.

Do what you love and love what you do. Don’t do anything for money. Everything should be for love.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness

Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!

If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

You can make yourself happy or miserable - it's the same amount of effort.

Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.

I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. ... I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything.

Get rid of those friends of yours who make fun of you and don't believe in you. And when you leave here tonight, go home, make a phone call and fire them. Anyone that doesn't believe in you and your future, to hell with them.

The 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.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

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

Treasure this day and Treasure yourself, truly, neither will ever happen again.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

I don't think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don't take the toys out of their hands, we're fools.

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

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.

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

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Everyone must leave something 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.

The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you're looking back ... well, it amounts to everything.