Screenwriter Quotes

“All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn.”

“What is it about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?...The thing man wanted to invent, but never did...If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledygook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.”

“I'm not a futurist.”

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

“One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more.”

“A computer does not smell ... if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.”

“Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is THERE, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate. The logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses.”

“The human race likes to give itself airs. One good volcano can produce more greenhouse gases in a year than the human race has in its entire history.”

“In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.”

“The terrible tyranny of the majority.”

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

“Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”

“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.”

“In our time the search for extraterrestrial life will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences. Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there.”

“I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible.”

“The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.”

“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.”

“I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.”

“It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt.”

“In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“His flesh took paleness from his bones.”

“We're going to become the martians when we land there. When we explore and build communities, we become the martians. That's a wonderful destiny for all of us.”