American author (1920-2012)
The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.
RAY BRADBURY
Dandelion Wine
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.... Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
RAY BRADBURY
Coda
Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.
RAY BRADBURY
Playboy, 1996
Life should be touched, not strangled.
RAY BRADBURY
Farewell Summer
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
attributed, The Writer's Workout
While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
RAY BRADBURY
preface, Zen in the Art of Writing
A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am. But it burns with a high flame.
RAY BRADBURY
The Paris Review, spring 2010
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
Farewell Summer
Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.
RAY BRADBURY
Dandelion Wine
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
Fahrenheit 451
Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action?
RAY BRADBURY
Something Wicked This Way Comes
I believe in Darwin and God together.
RAY BRADBURY
Playboy, 1996
Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
RAY BRADBURY
The Martian Chronicles
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
Playboy, 1996
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
Zen in the Art of Writing
Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid.
RAY BRADBURY
Salon Magazine, August 29, 2001
The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.
RAY BRADBURY
Dandelion Wine
If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.
RAY BRADBURY
Salon.com, August 29, 2001
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
Fahrenheit 451
There they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.
RAY BRADBURY
Rhodomagnetic Digest, May 1950