RAY BRADBURY QUOTES III

American author (1920-2012)

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


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

The Paris Review, spring 2010


If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.

RAY BRADBURY

Fahrenheit 451


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

RAY BRADBURY

Zen in the Art of Writing


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

attributed, Ray Bradbury: Uncensored!


Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.

RAY BRADBURY

attributed, Emily the Strange: Piece of Mind


Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.

RAY BRADBURY

Fahrenheit 451


Mars is like that uncleaned closet we have neglected for millenniums. Sin has collected there like bric-a-brac. Mars is twice Earth's age and has had double the number of Saturday nights, liquor baths, and eye-poppings at women as naked as white seals. When we open that closet door, things will fall on us.

RAY BRADBURY

The Illustrated Man


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

RAY BRADBURY

"No News, or, What Killed the Dog?"


Mars is opening up. It's a frontier now, like in the old days on Earth, out West, and in Alaska. Men are pouring up here. There's a couple thousand black Irish mechanics and miners and day laborers in First Town who need saving, because there're too many wicked women came with them, and too much ten-century-old Martian wine.

RAY BRADBURY

The Illustrated Man


Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

RAY BRADBURY

Coda


I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it's really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricochet that enables you to have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and superintellectual.

RAY BRADBURY

The Paris Review, spring 2010


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

Fahrenheit 451

Tags: depression


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

RAY BRADBURY

attributed, Get Started in Writing a Novel


You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

RAY BRADBURY

Zen in the Art of Writing


Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades.

RAY BRADBURY

The Halloween Tree


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

Fahrenheit 451


You know what Mars is? It's like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago--don't know if you ever had one--they called them kaleidoscopes, bits of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that's Mars. Enjoy it. Don't ask it to be nothing else but what it is.

RAY BRADBURY

The Martian Chronicles


"Mars is empty, there is no life there," we shout: There is life on Mars, and it is us. We are the Martians. We give ourselves a gift of us. We are more than water, we are more than earth, we are more than sun. We are the Life Force giving itself a reason for being.

RAY BRADBURY

A Chapbook for Burnt-Out Priests, Rabbis, and Ministers


The Viking Lander on Mars is a toy grown to large size, a metaphor of a dream; that dream of extending our will, our hand, our seeing eye to another world. It is not a machine, it is us.

RAY BRADBURY

Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures