Ray Bradbury Quotes

Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words.

First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did y...

He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged...

Remember, Montag, we're the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to mak...

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides of a question to worry him; gi...

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened...

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spe...

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for...

Do you know why books such as this are so important? They have quality. And what does the word quali...

No, no, it's not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph rec...

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfo...

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

...passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.

No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touc...

Silence. Montag sat like a carved white stone. The echo of the final hammer on his skull died slowly...

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said no...

In ballet, any dancer who asks himself what step comes next must freeze. Any man who takes a sex man...

Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them u...

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub ...

I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should...

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised a...

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd n...

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in fo...

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

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in...

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

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

I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well...

Surprise is where creativity comes in.

- Padre Peregrine, non ti comporterai mai con un po' di serietà?- No, finché il nostro Signore bened...

We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells li...

Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we’d ...

From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that h...

I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was i...

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electri...

His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did....

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of cent...

[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakesp...

Sunsets are loved because they vanish.Flowers are loved because they go.The dogs of the field and th...

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The...

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of sta...

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I sho...

And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the b...

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy.

Not everyone born free and equal, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then a...

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

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.He felt as if he had left the great seance ...

Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning.'He suddenly couldn't r...

Happiness is important. Fun is everything.

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself wa...

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them...

The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant. "May I ask you a question?""Yes.""H...

It was a simple thing. All terror is a simplicity. ("Interval In Sunlight")

But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.

I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the East River on an oil-slick, garbage infes...

A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The thi...

Why then you're as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust 'reality' and its moron mother, the univers...

Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. ...

We lived longer but at a price. We had to be our own children, having none.

Forgive, I hope you won't be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your d...

That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things differe...

Beware the autumn people

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with ...

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

But no man's a hero to himself.

..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of...

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

To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines....

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

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationalit...

I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and -lickety-split! I clim...

Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the bigges...

The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the ai...

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Futur...

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenali...

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the histo...

But most of all," she said, "I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all dayand look at ...

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

Without the library, you have no civilization.

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and blac...

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always t...

I have been the patient one. I have waited for the world to stop being silly. I have waited for it t...

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought...

We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.” – The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradb...

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I s...

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word...

My feet," said Montag. "I can't move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet won't

Or we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to putthings into ourse...

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many ye...

Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door. * * * They opened the do...

The dust was antique spice, burnt maple leaves, a prickling blue that teemed and sifted to earth. Sw...

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that wer...

The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what ...