Ray Bradbury Quotes

“So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.”

“Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.”

“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”

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

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

“The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

“When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field.”

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

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.”

“Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

“[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.”

“Each person was himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid, always alone. If I should scream, if I should call for help, would anyone hear would it even matter?”

“MOTHER: Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping. Promise me, Jim. Wherever you go and come back, bring lots of kids. Let them run wild. Let me spoil them, some day. JIM: I'm never going to own anything that can hurt me.”

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

“Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.”

“Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.”

“Love what you do and do what you love.”

“How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.”

“I don't go around thinking I'm Ray Bradbury all the time.”

“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.”

“How many times can a man go down and still be alive?”

“Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.”

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

“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”

“My goal is to entertain myself and others.”