Top 816 Quotes & Sayings by Ray Bradbury - Page 8

Since everything is but an apparition, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter. Longchenpa Let's stuff our eyes with wonder, let's live as if we'd drop dead in ten seconds. Let's see the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?" "Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.

Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered...sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks.

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.

No person ever died that had a family.

I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I'll be around a long time. A thousand years from now, a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade.

Write what you love and love what you write.

Without the library, you have no civilization.

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

Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.

I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen, and the sun burnt Time, that meant everything burnt!

My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead.

Everyone has a telephone. Whether they can afford it or not. It's one of those things that people have, regardless of their income.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so.

And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

For these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. Such are the autumn people.

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.

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

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.

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

How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.

Fame and money are gifts given to us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths.

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

Write 1000 words a day. That's only about four pages, but force yourself to do it. Put your finger down your throat and throw up. That's what writing's all about.

Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.

I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.

We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.

But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime. I know everything worth knowing about myself--" ~Something Wicked This Way Comes

The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society - cars kill more than wars do.

Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don't need to read it. They are the future.

So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.

Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course.

The terrible tyranny of the majority.

Hello!" He said hello and then said, "What are you up to now?" "I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it. "I don't think I'd like that," he said. "You might if you tried." "I never have." She licked her lips. "Rain even tastes good." "What do you do, go around trying everything once?" he asked. "Sometimes twice.

I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

I'll tell you," said Beatty, smiling at his cards. "That made you for a little while a drunkard. Read a few lines and off you go over the cliff. Bang, you're ready to blow up the world, chop off heads, knock down women and children, destroy authority. I know. I've been through it all.

Can't you recognize the human in the inhuman?

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

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.

Libraries are the center of our lives. There's no use going to a university if you don't live at the library.

There are two races of people -- men and women -- no matter what women's libbers would have you pretend. The male is motivated by toys and science because men are born with no purpose in the universe except to procreate. There is lots of time to kill beyond that. They've got to find work. Men have no inherent center to themselves beyond procreating. Women, however, are born with a center. They can create the universe, mother it, teach it, nurture it. Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don't need to read it. They are the future.

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.

You should love literature. You should live in the library. Forget about films.

I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well and good.

I don’t write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.

They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.

Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.

The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful. I’ve had a sign by my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, ‘DON’T THINK!’

When you go home tonight, make a list of the people who are impediments, who don't believe in you, and call them up and tell them, 'Get the hell out of my life.' You don't need them. Writing is tough enough without having people around you who contribute to a writer's insecurity.

And suddenly everything, absolutely everything, was there.

I believe in Darwin and God together.