Ray Bradbury was an American writer best known for his science fiction and fantasy stories. He wrote over 27 novels and hundreds of short stories. His most famous works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ray Bradbury on censorship, writing, technology.
If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.
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.
Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow aftter your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder. — Ray Bradbury
Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down. — Ray Bradbury
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Short Quotes
Heaven is a house with porch lights.
You can make yourself happy or miserable - it's the same amount of effort.
We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.
Treasure this day and Treasure yourself, truly, neither will ever happen again.
Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.
There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.
You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
The terrible tyranny of the majority.
We earth men have a talen for ruining big beautiful things.
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Censorship
There is more than one way to burn a book. — Ray Bradbury
It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. — Ray Bradbury
We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush. — Ray Bradbury
motivational quote by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Writing
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
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance. — Ray Bradbury
How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure. — Ray Bradbury
We are on impossibility in an impossible universe.
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
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
I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing. — Ray Bradbury
Life is trying things to see if they work.
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way. — Ray Bradbury
I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me. — Ray Bradbury
It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones. — Ray Bradbury
May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Books
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
The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. — Ray Bradbury
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
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour. — Ray Bradbury
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. — Ray Bradbury
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. — Ray Bradbury
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing. — Ray Bradbury
My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book. — Ray Bradbury
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
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
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Love
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
Do what you love and love what you do. Don’t do anything for money. Everything should be for love. — Ray Bradbury
I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater. — Ray Bradbury
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. — Ray Bradbury
You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon. — Ray Bradbury
Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love. — Ray Bradbury
...I mean, you don't just love people, you must LOVE them with exclamation points. — Ray Bradbury
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. — Ray Bradbury
Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it. — Ray Bradbury
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Reading
In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world. — Ray Bradbury
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
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. — Ray Bradbury
Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. — Ray Bradbury
Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. — Ray Bradbury
Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading. — Ray Bradbury
The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful. I’ve had a sign by my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, ‘DON’T THINK!’ — Ray Bradbury
Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course. — Ray Bradbury
Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me, I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read. — Ray Bradbury
..holding a book but reading the empty spaces. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Creativity
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. — Ray Bradbury
That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. — Ray Bradbury
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
Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed. — Ray Bradbury
It doesn't matter what you do...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. — Ray Bradbury
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him. — Ray Bradbury
Men are nuts. Young men are crazy. We all love toys. I'm toy oriented. I write about toys. I've got a lot of toys. Hundreds of things. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative. — Ray Bradbury
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
In order to be creative, you don't have to be original. — Ray Bradbury
Any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don't build a story; you allow it to explode. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Life
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. — Ray Bradbury
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. — Ray Bradbury
See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream. — Ray Bradbury
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
Life should be touched, not strangled. — Ray Bradbury
Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore. — Ray Bradbury
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
Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life. — Ray Bradbury
The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive. — Ray Bradbury
Life is trying things to see if they work. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Future
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
I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it. — Ray Bradbury
We are all . . . children of this universe. Not just Earth, or Mars, or this system, but the whole grand fireworks. And if we are interested in Mars at all, it is only because we wonder over our past and worry terribly about our possible future. — Ray Bradbury
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. — Ray Bradbury
I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past - a combination of both. — Ray Bradbury
There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves — Ray Bradbury
People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. — Ray Bradbury
Sometimes you have intuitive insight about how you think things are going to be, and you write that. Other times you fantasize completely, which has nothing to do with predicting the future. — Ray Bradbury
Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them. — Ray Bradbury
I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Death
The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it. — Ray Bradbury
Everything that happens before Death is what counts. — Ray Bradbury
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
Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move. — Ray Bradbury
I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love. — Ray Bradbury
When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die. — Ray Bradbury
I'll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags. — Ray Bradbury
Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. — Ray Bradbury
A day without writing was a little death. — Ray Bradbury
How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About Imaginative
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. — Ray Bradbury
A reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination. — Ray Bradbury
You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves. — Ray Bradbury
Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores. They're damn boring. They have no imagination, and they don't know how to imagine the future. — Ray Bradbury
Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination. — Ray Bradbury
I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her? — Ray Bradbury
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
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. — Ray Bradbury
Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About People
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little. — Ray Bradbury
I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going. — Ray Bradbury
If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you. — Ray Bradbury
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
The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time. — Ray Bradbury
But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last. — Ray Bradbury
Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless. — Ray Bradbury
Go out and make your own speeches. People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, "Hey, we got a crazy man in the community," and they'll begin talking to you. — Ray Bradbury
That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. — Ray Bradbury
The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Quotes About World
Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. — Ray Bradbury
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
There was her face, like a summer peach, beautiful and warm, and the light of the candles reflected in her dark eyes. [He] held his breath. The entire world waited and held its breath. — Ray Bradbury
A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem. — Ray Bradbury
Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did. — Ray Bradbury
Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. — Ray Bradbury
I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love. — Ray Bradbury
The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen, and the sun burnt Time, that meant everything burnt! — Ray Bradbury
Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? — Ray Bradbury
If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder. — Ray Bradbury
All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It's my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset, I've won or lost. At sunrise, I'm out again, giving it the old try. — Ray Bradbury
The merry-go-round was running, yes, but... It was running backward. The small calliope inside the carousel machinery rattle-snapped its nervous-stallion shivering drums, clashed its harvest-moon cymbals, toothed its castanets, and throatily choked and sobbed its reeds, whistles, and baroque flutes. — Ray Bradbury
Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down. — Ray Bradbury
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage. — Ray Bradbury
All flesh is one: what matter scores; Or color of the suit Or if the helmet glints with blue or gold? All is one bold achievement, All is fine spring-found-again-in-autumn day When juices run in antelopes along our blood, And green our flag, forever green... — Ray Bradbury
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. — Ray Bradbury
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. — Ray Bradbury
Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Morrocan midnight. Love a beautiful woman. — Ray Bradbury
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
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
The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes. — Ray Bradbury
I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them. — Ray Bradbury
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
Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else. — Ray Bradbury
I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. ... I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. — Ray Bradbury
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room. — Ray Bradbury
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
Since everything is but an apparition, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter. Longchenpa Let's stuff our eyes with wonder, let's live as if we'd drop dead in ten seconds. Let's see the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. — Ray Bradbury
I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking. — Ray Bradbury
An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience. — Ray Bradbury
We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over. — Ray Bradbury
I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down. — Ray Bradbury
How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you? — Ray Bradbury
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe. — Ray Bradbury
A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am. But it burns with a high flame. — Ray Bradbury
All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn. — Ray Bradbury
Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell! — Ray Bradbury
First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down. — Ray Bradbury
What church could compete with the fireworks of the pure soul? — Ray Bradbury
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. — Ray Bradbury
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
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down — Ray Bradbury
If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it. — Ray Bradbury
If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. — Ray Bradbury
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
We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. — Ray Bradbury
If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods. — Ray Bradbury
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
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. — Ray Bradbury
Life Lessons by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury taught us to never be afraid to take risks and to always strive for our dreams, no matter how impossible they may seem.
He also taught us to appreciate the little things in life and to take the time to enjoy them.
Lastly, he taught us to never stop learning and to always be curious about the world around us.
Citation
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