Ray Bradbury Quotes

Her eyes reversed into herself, to watch the secret heart of herself pounding itself into pieces against the side of her chest.

~ Ray Bradbury

Beware the autumn people

~ Ray Bradbury

Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.

~ Ray Bradbury

I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they're always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, 'We're going to break all the laws of physics.

~ Ray Bradbury

The entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can't have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

~ Ray Bradbury

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

~ Ray Bradbury

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts.He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

~ Ray Bradbury

He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that hardly seemed to be there. Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them...They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting, with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers.

~ Ray Bradbury

Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.

~ Ray Bradbury

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

~ Ray Bradbury

How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike. They stood like the naked pipes of a vast derelict calliope, their mouths cut into frantic vents. And now the great hand of mania descended upon one hundred-throated, unending scream.

~ Ray Bradbury

Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

~ Ray Bradbury

Not everyone born free and equal, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man. Me? I won't stomach them for a minute.

~ Ray Bradbury

In ballet, any dancer who asks himself what step comes next must freeze. Any man who takes a sex manual to bed with him invites frigidity. Dancing, sex, writing a novel--all are a living process, quick thought, emotion making yet more quick thought, and so on, cycling round.

~ Ray Bradbury

It is a subliminal thing. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.

~ Ray Bradbury

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

~ Ray Bradbury

Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.

~ Ray Bradbury

Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we’d die, we’d wander around and sleep like cats.

~ Ray Bradbury

And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.

~ Ray Bradbury

It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to drink, and we held the cold glasses in our hands, and Dad read the stereo-newspapers inserted into the special hat you put on your head and which turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three times in succession.

~ Ray Bradbury

I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.

~ Ray Bradbury

Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered? The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.

~ Ray Bradbury

We need to make progress. Otherwise we're waiting for news in a world where there is no longer any news.

~ Ray Bradbury

It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them.

~ Ray Bradbury

Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.

~ Ray Bradbury

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.

~ Ray Bradbury

Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words.

~ Ray Bradbury

People die every day, psychologically speaking. Some part of them gets tired. And that small part tries to kill off the entire person.

~ Ray Bradbury

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

~ Ray Bradbury

Forgive, I hope you won't be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this, I used to think that you were Mrs. God, and that the library was a whole world, and that no matter what part of the world or what people or thing I wanted to see and read, you'd find and give it to me.

~ Ray Bradbury

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

~ Ray Bradbury

Come on, get up, get up, you can't just sit! But he was still crying and that had to be finished.

~ Ray Bradbury

I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well and good. But I don't want to set out to influence people. I don't want to set out to change the world in any self-conscious way. That way leads to self-destruction; that way, you're pontificating, and that's dangerous and it's boring - you're going to put people right to sleep.

~ Ray Bradbury

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

~ Ray Bradbury

One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.The Fog Horn blew.

~ Ray Bradbury

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.

~ Ray Bradbury

Look at it this way, child, life is a magic show, or should be if people didn't go to sleep on each other. Always leave folks with a bit of mystery, son.

~ Ray Bradbury

Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.

~ Ray Bradbury

It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.

~ Ray Bradbury

Men are men, unfortunately, no matter what their shape, and inclined to sin.

~ Ray Bradbury