Ray Bradbury famous quotes

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Life #Age #Answers

Everything is generated through your own will power. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. This is a democracy. You go where you want to go and do what you want to do.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Democracy #Want #What You Want

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Inspirational #Life #Struggle

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.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Book #Fiction #Fantasy

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Inspirational #Life #Science

Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Fiction #Fantasy #Science Fiction

Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Worry #Important #Balls

I've been writing every day of my life for 65 years.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #Years

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #Stories #Week

Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Teaching #Kids #Writing

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Courage #Humor #Greatness

The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Mean #Years #Gears

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Ignorance

I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Believe #Writing #Creative

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Crazy #Book #Writing

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Lying #Book #Light

I don't believe in government. I hate politics. I'm against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Hate #Fall #Believe

Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Philosophy #Ideas #Birth Control

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Children #Wall #Flower

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

#Inspirational #Beautiful #Creativity

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Creativity #Writing #Ideas

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Inspirational #Writing #Reality

I don't believe in colleges and universities.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Believe #College #University

I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Dream #Fiction #Mankind

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Philosophy #Positive Thinking #Medicine

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Creativity #Thinking #Self

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
-- Ray Bradbury

#Real #Long #Important

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Insanity #Bipolar #Insane

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Letting Go #Should #Learn To Let Go

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Creativity #Thinking #Enemy

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Inspirational #Dream #Travel

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

#Believe #School #College

That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Country #Rain #Twilight

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Future #Trying #Programming

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Real #Cutting #Men

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Teamwork #Believe #Hard Work

I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #Ideas #Needs

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.
-- Ray Bradbury

#School #Library #Use

Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Teacher #Inspire #Librarian

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Inspiring #Trust #Fall

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #Careers #Pleasant

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Inspirational #Learning #Wings

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

#Imagination #Want #What You Want

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #Intuition #Way

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Love #Inspirational #Good Morning

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

#Book #Reading #Past

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.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Order #Years #Numbers

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.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Men #Two Sides #Worry

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Faith #Morning #Teaching

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
-- Ray Bradbury

#School #Intellectual #Swimmer

[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

#Book #Dark #Library

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Air #People #Looks

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

#Believe #Thinking #Ideas

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #Men #Dreamer

Creativity is a continual surprise.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Creativity #Creative #Surprise

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?
-- Ray Bradbury

#Reading #Cutting #Thinking

We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.
-- Ray Bradbury

#War #Moving #Astronaut

You fail only if you stop writing.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #Failing

I don't think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don't take the toys out of their hands, we're fools.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Taken #Men #Thinking

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Science #Impossible #Impossibility

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

#Nice #Book #Smell

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Education #Book #College

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Sadness #People #Special

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

#Art #Creativity #Cat

You can make yourself happy or miserable - it's the same amount of effort.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Happiness #Effort #Miserable

Sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Crazy #Book #Hats

The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Teacher #Giving #Speak

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe
-- Ray Bradbury

#Art #Needs #Breathe

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.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Rivers #Stories #Stopping

Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Live Life #Answers

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Death #Loss #Thinking

The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you're looking back ... well, it amounts to everything.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Happy Life #Years #Doe

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

#Art #Writing #Self

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #Light #White

We are the witnesses to the miracle. We are put here by creation, by God....We're here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Spiritual #Jobs #Miracle

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Farenheit 451

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Good Night #Sleep #Ice

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

#Fear #Scare #Rebel

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #Acceptance #Rejection

We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Inspirational #Travel #Romance

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?
-- Ray Bradbury

#Book #Gun #Men

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.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Friendship #Inspiring #Potters

Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Shadow #Rooms #Poverty

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...
-- Ray Bradbury

#Summer #Fall #Wine

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Book #Reading #Color

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.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Father #Writing #Soul

Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Inspirational #Travel #Fun

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?
-- Ray Bradbury

#Book #Writing #Sleep

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.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Sweet #Eye #Soul

That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Hurt #Home #Waiting

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Thinking #Average #People

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Mistake #Ignorance #Cutting

Write what you love and love what you write.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Writing #And Love

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.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Passion #Typewriters #Worry

Do what you love and love what you do. Don’t do anything for money. Everything should be for love.
-- Ray Bradbury

#And Love #Should

What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Men #Creative #Muse

Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.
-- Ray Bradbury

#World

My job is to help you fall in love.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Falling In Love #Jobs #Fall

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.
-- Ray Bradbury

#Real #School #Boys