Ray Bradbury Quotes

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

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.

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

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow aftter your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

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

I love writing, it's the center of my life.

If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living.

We earth men have a talen for ruining big beautiful things.

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.

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

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

You dont have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

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

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

Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day..

We are on impossibility in an impossible universe.

Life is trying things to see if they work.

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher.

Space travel has again made children of us all.

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

Life is trying things to see if they work.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for.

We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it.

If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.

If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair.

We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: It's gonna go wrong. Or She's going to hurt me. Or,I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . . Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.

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

It was a pleasure to burn.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine.

The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Richard Bach with this book does two things.

He gives me Flight. He makes me Young. For both I am deeply grateful.

My stories run up and bite me in the leg -- I respond by writing them down - everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

I've only written one science-fiction book: 'Fahrenheit 451.

' That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.

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

I'm not a futurist.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

If an idea isn't exciting, you shouldn't do it.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

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

There is more than one way to burn a book.

And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

I don't do research. I never have.

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

When I was a young man, I didn't think about having a family.

My wife and I were too poor to have babies. Then all of a sudden, one came along and scared the hell out of us because we had no money. Once the baby arrives, you make do somehow. You fall in love with the baby and life adjusts itself. You find you don't need as much money as you thought. When that happens, you can ask the questions that should have come before the baby.

There's no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

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

I don't see myself as a philosopher. That's awfully boring.

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.

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

If you're embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn't include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.

I got started as an actor when I was 12.

All of my writing is God-given.