Ray Bradbury Quotes

From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

~ Ray Bradbury

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.]

~ Ray Bradbury

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

~ Ray Bradbury

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

~ Ray Bradbury

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

~ Ray Bradbury

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.

~ Ray Bradbury

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

~ Ray Bradbury

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.

~ Ray Bradbury

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

~ Ray Bradbury

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.

~ Ray Bradbury

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 actionis through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire letrun, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It canonly be dynamic. So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do.

~ Ray Bradbury

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

~ Ray Bradbury

Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

~ Ray Bradbury

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

~ Ray Bradbury

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

~ Ray Bradbury

Don't they get afraid, then?They have a religion for that.

~ Ray Bradbury

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?

~ Ray Bradbury

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

~ Ray Bradbury

Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law. Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors... All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need intact and safe. We're not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good... Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It's not pleasant, but then we're not in control, we're the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.

~ Ray Bradbury

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.

~ Ray Bradbury

The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.

~ Ray Bradbury

The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.

~ Ray Bradbury

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.

~ Ray Bradbury

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

~ Ray Bradbury

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

~ Ray Bradbury

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.

~ Ray Bradbury

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

~ Ray Bradbury

The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal. Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

~ Ray Bradbury

We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.

~ Ray Bradbury

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

~ Ray Bradbury

Libraries raised me.

~ Ray Bradbury

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

~ Ray Bradbury

(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.

~ Ray Bradbury

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

~ Ray Bradbury

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

~ Ray Bradbury

Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.

~ Ray Bradbury

His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

~ Ray Bradbury

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

~ Ray Bradbury

But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

~ Ray Bradbury

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.

~ Ray Bradbury