American author (1920-2012)
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
Fahrenheit 451
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
The Martian Chronicles
Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.
RAY BRADBURY
Dandelion Wine
Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.
RAY BRADBURY
Brown Daily Herald, March 24, 1995
My stories run up and bite me in the leg -- I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
RAY BRADBURY
introduction, The Stories of Ray Bradbury
The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
RAY BRADBURY
"G. B. S.--Mark V", I Sing the Body Electric and Other Stories
If you want to write ... 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.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Words from the Wise
Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.
RAY BRADBURY
A Graveyard for Lunatics
What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
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
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance -- the idea that anything is possible.
RAY BRADBURY
Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1976
Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
RAY BRADBURY
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
RAY BRADBURY
The Meadow
When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.
RAY BRADBURY
The Paris Review, spring 2010
Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
RAY BRADBURY
The October Country
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
RAY BRADBURY
The Paris Review, spring 2010
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
RAY BRADBURY
Zen in the Art of Writing
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
There are two races of people -- men and women -- no matter what women's libbers would have you pretend. The male is motivated by toys and science because men are born with no purpose in the universe except to procreate. There is lots of time to kill beyond that. They've got to find work. Men have no inherent center to themselves beyond procreating. Women, however, are born with a center. They can create the universe, mother it, teach it, nurture it. Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don't need to read it. They are the future.
RAY BRADBURY
Playboy, 1996
That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
RAY BRADBURY
Zen in the Art of Writing