Top 816 Quotes & Sayings by Ray Bradbury - Page 4

Sunsets are loved because they vanish. Flowers are loved because they go. The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart. These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.

That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

In order to be creative, you don't have to be original.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

I’ve learned that by doing things, things get done.

People who take books on sex to bed become frigid. You get self-conscious. You can't think a story. You can't think, "I shall do a story to improve mankind." Well, it's nonsense. All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't. A story is the same way. You either feel a story and need to write it, or you better not write it.

I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.

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

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

If someone tells you to do something for money, tell them to go to hell.

A life's work should be based on love.

Stuff your eyes with wonder.

I don't decide. My secret self decides. I just go with my subconscious. If it wants to do a poem, I do a poem, and if it wants to do a play, I do a play. So I'm not in charge, I'm not in control.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.

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.

A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.

Life is about trying things to see if they work.

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.

I believe the universe created us - we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious.

We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.

May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Action is hope. There is no hope without action.

Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.

I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it - and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything - so they never get anything.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while.

If you love people you criticize them, and if you don't love them you don't criticize them, you let them go to hell, don't you? To help any kind of friendship, your marriage, your children, you criticize because you love.

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

You've been put on the world to love the act of being alive.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

You feed yourself. Make sure you have all the information, whether it's aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, I don't care what it is. Then you walk away from it and let it ferment. You ignore it and pretend you don't care. Next thing you know, the answer comes.

But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.

I don't like realism. We already know the real facts about li[fe], most of the basic facts. I'm not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we're 18, we're up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It's interpretation.

Heaven is a house with porch lights.

Good to evil seems evil

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

We are the witnesses to the miracle. We are put here by creation, by God....We're here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate.

I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.

I laugh until I weep And weep until I smile

Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.

When a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.

The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.

An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.

Don't think about things, just do them; don't predict them, just make them.

All education is self-discovery.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.