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Ray Bradbury

American author and screenwriter (1920–2012)

Ray Douglas Bradbury (22 August 1920 – 5 June 2012) was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer.

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.

Quotes

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Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
 
Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
 
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.
 
Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.
 
A. E. van Vogt was not strange, he was kind. He gave me advice and helped me along the road to becoming what I wanted to become.
 
At the center of religion is love … Everything in our life should be based on love.
 
Joy is the grace we say to God.
  • There they go, off to Venus, 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.
    • "A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles", in Rhodomagnetic Digest (May 1950)
  • The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.
    • "And the Rock Cried Out" (1953), reprinted in The Day It Rained Forever (1959)
  • Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.
    • The Circus of Dr. Lao Introduction (1956)
  • Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.
    • "A Miracle of Rare Device", in Playboy (January 1962)
  • 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…
    • "All flesh is one: what matter scores?" in When Elephants Last In The Dooryard Bloomed : Celebrations For Almost Any Day In The Year (1973)
  • Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
    • "All flesh is one: what matter scores?" in When Elephants Last In The Dooryard Bloomed : Celebrations For Almost Any Day In The Year (1973)
  • All silence is.
    All emptiness.
    And now:
    The dawn.
    • "Emily Dickinson, where are you? Herman Melville called your name last night in his sleep!" in When Elephants Last In The Dooryard Bloomed : Celebrations For Almost Any Day In The Year (1973)
  • YOUR INFLUENCE ON US ALL, FROM 1939 ON, CANNOT BE MEASURED. I CAN ONLY SAY I REMEMBER, WARMLY, YOUR MANY KINDNESSES TO ME WHEN I WAS 19–20–21 YEARS OLD. THAT YOUNG MAN BASKED IN YOUR LIGHT AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE GRATEFUL FOR THE HELP YOU OFFERED WHEN I WAS SO POOR & NEEDFUL!
  • We clothe ourselves in flame
    And trade new myths for old.
    The Greek gods christen us
    With ghosts of comet swords;
    God smiles and names us thus: "
    "Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!"
    • "We March Back to Olympus" in Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns (1977), p. 11
  • 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.
    • Beyond 1984: The People Machines (1979)
  • I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?
    • "Why Cartoons Are Forever", Los Angeles Times (3 December 1989)
  • 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.
    • Introduction to The Stories of Ray Bradbury
  • And what, you ask, does writing teach us?
    First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
    So 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.
  • 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.
  • From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
    • Zen in the Art of Writing (1990)
  • Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be.
  • Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.
    • A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990)
  • Oh God, without them [libraries], what have we? We have no past and we have no future.
    • Mojave magazine (November 1990)
  • The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us – it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. … You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
    • As quoted in "Bradbury Still Believes in Heat of ‘Fahrenheit 451’", interview by Misha Berson, in The Seattle Times (12 March 1993); later quoted in Reader's Digest and The Times Book of Quotations. The 1993 Seattle Times is the earliest verified source located. All other citations come later and either provide a direct reference to the Seattle Times' (chiefly: Reader's Digest, credited to "Ray Bradbury, quoted by Misha Berson in Seattle Times", in "Quotable Quotes", The Reader's Digest, Vol. 144, No. 861, January 1994, p. 25), or an indirect reference to the re-quoting in Reader's Digest (such as: The Times Book of Quotations (Philip Howard, ed.), 2000, Times Books and HarperCollins, p. 93
    • Variant: We're not teaching kids to read and write and think. … There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.
  • I've always written at the top of my lungs and from some secret motives within. I have followed the advice of my good friend Federico Fellini who, when asked about his work, said, "Don't tell me what I'm doing, I don't want to know."
    • Author's Introduction to 2003 Folio Society edition of Fahrenheit 451
  • Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.
    • Brown Daily Herald (24 March 1995)
  • My job is to help you fall in love.
    • Speech at Brown University (1995)
  • Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.
    • Speech at Brown University (1995)
  • We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe.... If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal.
    • Speech to National School Board Association (1995)
  • The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.
    • Speech at Eureka College (1997)
  • 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.
    • "G. B. S. — Mark V", in I Sing the Body Electric: And Other Stories (1998)
  • The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.
    • Foreword to A Passion for Books (1999) by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan
  • At the end of June in 1939 I took a bus east to New York to attend the first World Science Fiction convention. On the bus with me I took the June of Astounding Science-Fiction in which the short story by A. E. van Vogt appeared. It was an astonishing encounter. In that same issue with him were C. L. Moore and Ross Rocklynne, a fantastic issue to take with me on that long journey, for I was still a poor unpublished writer selling newspapers on a street corner for ten dollars a week and hoping, someday, to be an established writer myself, but that was still two years off. On the way I drank in the words of A.E. Van Vogt and was stunned by what I saw there. He became a deep influence for the next year.
    As it turned out, I didn't become A.E. Van Vogt, no one else could, and when I finally met him was pleased to see that the man was as pleasant to be with as were his stories.     I knew him over a long period of years and he was a kind and wonderful gentleman, a real asset to the Science Fantasy Society in L.A., where there are a lot of strange people. A.E. Van Vogt was not strange, he was kind. He gave me advice and helped me along the road to becoming what I wanted to become.
  • 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.
    • Salon.com (29 August 2001)
  • Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time— And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.
    • Salon.com (29 August 2001)
  • Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid.
    • Salon Magazine (29 August 2001)
  • 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.
    • As quoted in Ray Bradbury: The Uncensored Biography (2006) by Gene Beley, p. 284
  • I believe the universe created us — we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious.
    • AARP Magazine (July-August 2008)
  • A life's work should be based on love.
  • There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.
    • BookExpo America, Los Angeles (May 2008). Reported in USA Today (June 1, 2008) and The Guardian (3 June 2008)
  • Joy is the grace we say to God.
    • As quoted in "Sci-fi legend "Ray Bradbury on God, 'monsters and angels'" by John Blake, CNN : Living (2 August 2010), p. 2
  • We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.
    • As quoted in "Sci-fi legend "Ray Bradbury on God, 'monsters and angels'" by John Blake, CNN : Living (2 August 2010), p. 3
  • I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.

The Martian Chronicles (1950)

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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.
  • The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land.
    • Rocket Summer (1950)
  • Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.
    • Ylla (1950)
  • We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.
    • —And the Moon Be Still as Bright (1948)
  • I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I’ve got what amounts to a religion, now.
    • —And the Moon Be Still as Bright (1948)
  • I’m being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite.
    • Usher II (1950)
  • The gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.
    • There Will Come Soft Rains (1950)
  • Timothy looked at the deep ocean sky, trying to see Earth and the war and the ruined cities and the men killing each other since the day he was born. But he saw nothing. The war was as removed and far off as two flies battling to the death in the arch of a great high and silent cathedral. And just as senseless...
    “What are you looking at so hard, Dad?”
    “I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace, and responsibility.”
    “All that up there?”
    “No. I didn’t find it. It’s not there any more. Maybe it’ll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it was ever there.”
    • The Million-Year Picnic (1946)

The Illustrated Man (1951)

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  • We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.
    • No Particular Night or Morning (1951)
    • Peekaboo.
    • Zero Hour

Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

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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.
Main article: Fahrenheit 451
  • A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.
    • Part 1, "The Hearth and the Salamander"
  • With schools 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.
    • Part 1, "The Hearth and the Salamander"
  • 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.
    • Part 1, "The Hearth and the Salamander"
  • You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
    • Part 2, "The Sieve and the Sand"
  • If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.
    • Part 2, "The Sieve and the Sand"
  • Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?
    • Part 2, "The Sieve and the Sand"
  • Montag, you're looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the "guilty," but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.
    • Part 2, "The Sieve and the Sand"
  • 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.
    • Part 3, "Burning Bright"
  • 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.
    • Part 3, "Burning Bright"

Coda (1979)

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Afterword to the 1979 edition of Fahrenheit 451.
 
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
  • There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. 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.
  • Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
  • For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
  • For, let's face it, 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. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

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  • The monster cried out at the tower. The foghorn blew. The monster roared again. The foghorn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth, and the sound that came from it was the sound of the foghorn itself.
    • The Foghorn, first published in The Saturday Evening Post (1951) with the title "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms"
  • All floated upon an evening carrousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely haunted by television.
    • The Wilderness (1952)
  • On the whole, the change had done Huxley a share of good. Death made him a handsomer man to deal with. You could talk to him now and he’d have to listen.
    • The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (1948)
  • In touch! There’s a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices.
    • The Murderer (1953)
  • “And what happened next?”
    “Silence happened next. God, it was beautiful.”
    • The Murderer (1953)
  • The telephone rang like a spoiled brat.
    • The Murderer (1953)
  • Then I went in and shot the televisor, 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, but myself always going back, going back hoping and waiting until—bang!
    • The Murderer (1953)
  • “I believe,” said the first lady, “that our souls are in our hands. For we do everything to the world with our hands. Sometimes I think we don’t use our hands half enough; it’s certain we don’t use our heads.”
    • Embroidery (1951)
  • I’ve done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done to me. I took the bottom out of her life.
    • The Great Wide World Over There (1953)
  • Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine.
    “I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.
    • Powerhouse (1948)

The October Country (1955)

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  • THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…
    • Epigraph
  • “Don’t these people ever get lonely?”
    “They’re used to it this way.”
    “Don’t they get afraid, then?”
    ”They have a religion for that.”
    “I wish I had a religion.”
    “The minute you get a religion you stop thinking,” he said. “Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.”
    • The Next in Line (1947)
  • More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it’s too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing, a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and—irritable murder.
    • Touched With Fire (1954)
  • “It will only take a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
    “I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”
    • Uncle Einar (1947)
  • “Oh,” said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. “A man with wings.”
    That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him.
    • Uncle Einar (1947)
  • Anna said, “Must they have a reason?”
    “No, not if they’re insane, no,” said Juliet. “In that case no reasons are necessary.”
    • The Cistern (1947)
  • He stood very straight and thought of nothing, or at least thought of thinking nothing.
    • Homecoming (1946)
  • All the sadder that Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past.
    • The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone (1954)

Dandelion Wine (1957)

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The chapters, most of which were originally published as standalone stories, are not numbered in the book. Page numbers here are taken from the mass market paperback edition published by Bantam Spectra as part of The Grand Master Editions.
  • 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.
    • p. 62
  • Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.
    • p. 71
  • Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.
    • p. 74
  • 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.
    • p. 81
  • “No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”
    • p. 85
  • Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another.
    • p. 134
  • “I don’t know,” he admitted.
    “Well.” She started pouring tea. “To start things off, what do you think of the world?”
    “I don’t know anything.”
    “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.”
    “You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years.”
    “It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it’s an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn’t life a play? Don’t I play it well?”
    They both laughed quietly.
    • p. 142
  • Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you’re twenty.
    • p. 147
  • I’m not afraid. When you live as long as I’ve lived, you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I’d never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can’t say I’m greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don’t fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it.
    • p. 150
  • I’ve alway known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It’s essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don’t know.
    • p. 151
  • The sun did not rise, it overflowed.
    • p. 211
  • Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple.
    • p. 223
  • And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.
    • p. 235
  • Next year’s going to be even bigger, days will be brighter, nights longer and darker, more people dying, more babies born, and me in the middle of it all.
    • pp. 235-236

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

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  • "You take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That's you [our son]."
    • Chapter 28
  • "For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles -- breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.”
    • Chapter 38
  • "If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people."
    • Chapter 38
  • "Will sensed a stir in Jim's house; Jim, too, with his fine dark antennae, must have felt the waters part high over town to let a Leviathan pass."
    • Chapter 29

R Is for Rocket (1962)

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  • The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.
    • Introduction
  • Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye.
    • Here There Be Tygers (1951)
  • “War!”
    The thought stood in Sim’s brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.
    But why? Wasn’t life short enough without fighting and killing?
    • Frost and Fire (1946)
  • Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man’s attitude when he has power.
    • Frost and Fire (1946)
  • “It will only take a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
    “I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”
    • Uncle Einar (1947)
  • Beware, Charlie, 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.
    • The Time Machine (1955)
  • “You remember winning, don’t you? A battle won, somewhere?”
    “No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.
    • The Time Machine (1955)

I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)

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See Ray Bradbury's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details
Page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Bantam Books in 1971, ISBN 0-553-20545-5, 12th printing (August 1981)
Italics and ellipsis as in the book
  • “You really talk,” he said.
    “Compulsive,” I said.”
    “You’d make a lousy writer,” he said. “I never knew a writer yet who was a good talker.”
    • The Kilimanjaro Device (p. 9)
  • I’d hate to have you running hell, the lost souls would never get fried!
    • The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place (p. 14)
  • There’s too much chance for shock. And yet I must tell her the truth. A doctor gets nowhere by lying to his patient.
    • Tomorrow’s Child (p. 34)
  • You’re a has-been that never was. And you’re going to stay that way, spoiled and narcissistic and small and mean and rotten.
    • Downwind from Gettysburg (p. 86)
  • “You move against my ethics,” said the priest.
    “A drowning man clutches at anything,” said Nolan, “and ethics may drown with him if that’s what he grabs instead of a life belt.”
    • The Cold Wind and the Warm (p. 107)
  • “Off the mount, Nolan,” said the priest, “and enough of the sermon. What’s your point?”
    • The Cold Wind and the Warm (p. 108)
  • I have hit forty, forty has hit me, like a locomotive.
    • The Haunting of the New (p. 143)
  • He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that's how it turned out.
    • I Sing the Body Electric! (p. 180)
  • And though the debate may run another hundred thousand years: What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering, handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream...
    • I Sing the Body Electric! (p. 182)
  • She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory—you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he’s all out of kilter.
    • The Tombling Day (p. 196)
  • But all the little inside-people sitting around in her head would rock back in their tiny rockers and cackle and say, “You ain’t foolin’ us none, Grandma.”
    • The Tombling Day (p. 197)
  • Oh, oh. Here he comes, Moses crossing a Black Sea of bile.
    • Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine (p. 211)
  • You know and I know, I am Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles.
    • Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine (p. 214)
  • Some laugh, some cry, some bang the world with fists, some run, but it all sums up the same: they make do.
    The world swarms with people, each one drowning, but each swimming a different stroke to the far shore.
    • Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine (p. 219)
  • The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years.
    Way off in that direction: silence.
    Way off in that direction: hush.
    It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were.
    • Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine (p. 222)
  • In sum, my contact lenses had made me fifteen years old again. That is: festering, self-crucified bundle of doubt, horror, and absolute imperfection. The worst age in all one’s life had returned to haunt me with its pimpled, bumpy ghost.
    • The Man in the Rorschach Shirt (p. 249)
  • I am a beautiful woman. I have been beautiful all of my life. Which means that from the start people lied because they simply wished to be with me. I grew up surrounded by the untruths of men, women, and children who could not risk my displeasure. When beauty pouts, the world trembles.
    Have you ever seen a beautiful woman surrounded by men, seen them nodding, nodding? Heard their laughter? Men will laugh at anything a beautiful woman says. Hate themselves, yes, but they will laugh, say no for yes and yes for no.
    • The Lost City of Mars (pp. 271-272)
  • And then, the stars came out. It was like that first night of childhood when his father had taken him out beyond the city to a hill where the lights could not diminish the Universe. And there were a thousand, no ten thousand, no ten million billion stars filling the darkness. The stars were manifold and bright, and they did not care. Even then he had known: they do not care. If I breathe or do not breathe, live or die, the eyes that look from all around don’t care.
    • The Lost City of Mars (p. 289)

The Halloween Tree (1972)

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Page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Bantam Spectra as part of The Grand Master Editions, ISBN 0-553-25823-0
Italics and formatting as in the book
  • It’s big, it’s broad…
    It’s broad, it’s bright…
    It fills the sky of All Hallow’s Night…
    The strangest sight you’ve ever seen.
    The Monster Tree on Halloween.
    • Chapter 5 (pp. 28-29)
  • The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile.
    • Chapter 7 (p. 50)
  • The days of the Long Cold are done. Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in the winter cave.
    • Chapter 10 (p. 73)
  • O autumn winds that bake and burn
    And all the world to darkness turn,
    Now storm and seize and make of me…
    A swarm of leaves from Autumn’s Tree!
    • Chapter 11 (p. 79)
  • “What’s happening, Mr. Moundshroud? Where are we?”
    Moundshroud struck a flinty finger into fire and held it up. “Why, bless me, boys. It’s the Dark Ages. The longest darkest night ever.”
    • Chapter 13 (p. 96)
  • Mr. Moundshroud, who are YOU?
    And Mr. Moundshroud, way up there on the roof, sent his thoughts back:
    I think you know, boy, I think you know.
    Will we meet again, Mr. Moundshroud?
    Many years from now, yes, I’ll come for you.
    And a last thought from Tom:
    O Mr. Moundshroud, will we EVER stop being afraid of nights and death?
    And the thought returned:
    When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.
    • Chapter 19 (pp. 178-179)

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

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First published in Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) edited by Harlan Ellison
 
Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair
Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear
And say out prayers that most need saying
For needful sinners who've forgotten praying
 
When, trussed and bound and nailed,
You sacrifice your life, your liberty
You hang yourself upon the tenterhook.
Pull free!
 
Why have you been so blind?
Why have you never seen?
The slave and master in one skin
Is all your history, no more, no less,
Confess! This is what you've been.
 
Christ, who once was employed as single Son of God
Now finds Himself among three billion on a billion
Brother sons, their arms thrown wide to grasp and hold
and walk them everywhere…
 
Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings,
In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.
  • Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair
    Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear
    And say out prayers that most need saying
    For needful sinners who've forgotten praying    ;
    And in every alcove and niche you spy
    The living dead who envy the long since gone
    Who never wished to die.
  • And from above a voice fused half in iron
    Half in irony gives man a dreadful choice.
    The role is his, it says, Man makes and loads his own strange dice,
    They sum at his behest,
    He dooms himself. He is his own sad jest.
    Let go? Let be?
    Why do you ask this gift from Me?
    When, trussed and bound and nailed,
    You sacrifice your life, your liberty
    You hang yourself upon the tenterhook.
    Pull free!
  • You make to die
    You are the dead
    You the assassin of yourself    .
  • You are the jailer and the jailed,
    You the impaler and the one that your own
    Million-fleshed self in dreams by night
    do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill.
  • Why have you been so blind?
    Why have you never seen?
    The slave and master in one skin
    Is all your history, no more, no less,
    Confess! This is what you've been.
  • The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar;
    A moment terrible to hear.
  • Man warring on himself an old tale is;
    But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow in himself,
    Finding his left hand and his right
    Are similar sons, are children fighting
    In the porchyards of the void?!
  • That so much time was wasted in this pain.
    Ten thousand years ago he might have let off down
    To not return again!
    A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;
    The laughter sets him free.
    A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.
    The Fool is me!
    And with one final shake of laughter
    Breaks his bonds.
    The nails fall skittering to marble floors.
    And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle
    As Man steps down in amiable wisdom
    To give himself what no one else can give:
    His liberty.
  • Trapped in the blood, athirst for air,
    Christ, who once was employed as single Son of God
    Now finds Himself among three billion on a billion
    Brother sons, their arms thrown wide to grasp and hold
    and walk them everywhere
    Now weaving this, now weaving that in swoons…
  • Ten thousand times a million sons of sons move
    Through one great and towering town
    Wearing their wits, which means their laughter,
    As their crown. Set free upon the earth
    By simple gifts of knowing how mere mirth can cut the bonds
    And pull the blood spikes out    ;
    Their conversation shouts of "Fool!"
  • A single face turned upward toward all Time
    One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.
  • I am the dreamer and the doer
    I the hearer and the knower
    I the giver and the taker
    I the sword and the wound of sword.
    If this be true, then let sword fall free from hand.
    I embrace myself.
    I laugh until I weep
    And weep until I smile    …
  • Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings,
    In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.

Long After Midnight (1976)

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See Ray Bradbury's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details
Page numbers from the first mass market paperback edition published by Bantam Books in 1978, ISBN 0-553-10882-4, 1st printing
Italics and ellipsis as in the book
  • “Recant!” Create a voice “confess and recant! Recant!”
    “There is nothing to confess, therefore no need for recantation,” said the old man quietly.
    • G.B.S.—Mark V (p. 73)
  • How sad. The city unwrapped you like a candy bar and ate you all up. You’re nothing but a dusty milk bottle left on a tenement porch, a spider building a nest across the top. Traffic din pounded your marrow to dust. Subway sucked your breath like a cat sucks the soul of a babe. Vacuum cleaners got your brain. Alcohol dissolved the rest. Typewriters and computers took your final dregs in and out their tripes, printed you on paper, punched you in confettis, threw you down a sewer vent. TV scribbled you in nervous tics on old ghost screens. Your final bones will be carried off by a big angry bulldog crosstown bus holding you munched in its big rubber-lipped mouth door.
    • Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds (p. 121)
  • God gives us dreadful gifts. The most dreadful of all is memory.
    • The Wish (p. 172)
  • You’re not God, are you? You don’t look like him.
    • Forever and the Earth (p. 182)
  • A few days before the picnic, he had found a photograph of his father twenty-five years younger, standing with a group of friends at college. The photograph had disturbed him, made him aware as he had not been before of the passing of time, the swift flow of the years away from youth. A picture taken of him as he was now would, in twenty-five years, look as strange to his own children as his father’s picture did to him—unbelievably young, a stranger out of a strange, never-returning time.
    • The Pumpernickel (p. 252)
  • The weather said it had been here forever, man was hardly here at all, and would soon be gone.
    • Long After Midnight (p. 255)
  • “I didn’t mean…” said laughing.
    “Nobody means, but everybody says, and luckily I got the hide of an iguana.”
    • Long After Midnight (p. 257)
  • Kid, don’t tell us what we should be when you don’t even know what we are.
    • Long After Midnight (p. 259)

The Toynbee Convector (1988)

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See Ray Bradbury's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details
Page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Bantam Spectra in June 1989, ISBN 0-553-27957-2, first printing
  • He struck off into the forest, idly, drawn steadily by a sound that was large enough to fill the universe, the sound of a river going somewhere and not caring; the most beautiful sound of all.
    • One Night in Your Life (p. 38)
  • He waked through the green forest and listened to the various silences there. Not one silence, but several; the silence that the moss made underfoot, the silence the shadows made depending from the trees, the silence of small streams exploring tiny countries on all sides as he came into a clearing.
    • One Night in Your Life (p. 40)
  • “Watch your liver!” said his mother.
    “Is that a threat, or a toast?” said his father.
    • I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here? (p. 79)
  • I felt that killing wrench men feel when beauty passes and will not pass again. You want to cry out: Stay. I love you. But you do not speak. And the summer walks away in her flesh, never to return.
    • Banshee (p. 103)
  • “You go against the letter of the law!”
    “No,” explained the priest, calmly, “we but shift the punctuation, cross new t’s, dot new i’s.”
    • One for His Lordship, and One for the Road! (p. 137)
  • Whole town out there is up to their earholes in watchsprings, no hands on the clocks, afraid to get up every morning and find it’s always always and forever Sunday!
    • Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy (p. 216)

Bradbury Talk Likely to Feature the Unexpected (1994)

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Quotes from "Bradbury Talk Likely to Feature the Unexpected" by Anne Gasior, Dayton Daily News (1 October 1994), City Edition, Lifestyle/Weekendlife Section, p. 1 · Republished in Conversations with Ray Bradbury (2003) by Steven Louis Aggelis (PDF), p. 104
  • Q: How many times have people attempted to ban your work?
    RB: Very rarely, occasionally by little frogs in little puddles. It’s never anything serious.
    This comes up in any society where people have different opinions. You’re a Catholic and I’m a Baptist and we may have problems. If you’re a homosexual and I’m heterosexual, we may have problems. You’re black and I’m white. You’ve got all these differences and people get sensitive and they want to change all the books. And you have to tell them to go sit down somewhere.
  • I didn’t write Fahrenheit 451 about us. I wrote it about Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler. … I may not even talk about book banning if I don’t feel like it. I don’t prepare anything ahead. I have a dozen subjects to talk about because I write plays and poetry and essays, short stories and novels and screenplays and teleplays and operas. I’ll get lost, and the audience will have a wonderful time. And I’ll get a standing ovation, and they’ll go home.
  • I’m working on a screenplay of Fahrenheit 451 that will star Mel Gibson. It will be better than the original because they left a lot of things out of the first film. … It works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can’t say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It’s thought control and freedom of speech control.
  • I’m a magician who writes about ideas. I’m not a science-fiction writer. People who call me that are wrong. Most of what I write is fantasy or magic realism or plays about my Mexican-American background.

Playboy interview (1996)

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In science fiction, we dream.
"About Ray Bradbury", in Playboy (May 1996)
 
My book had just come out, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf, signed it and gave it to him. His face fell and my heart sank, but two days later he called … His rave turned my life around; the book immediately made the best-seller lists and has been in print ever since.
 
George no doubt thought he could get me off his back by using my words for one of the eight-line vignettes he had Gracie close their broadcasts with. I wanted to live that special life forever.
  • The way to teach in this world is to pretend you're not teaching. Science fiction offers the chance to pretend to look the other way while teaching. Science fiction is also 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.
  • 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. … People are talking about the Internet as a creative tool for writers. I say, "B.S. Stay away from that. Stop talking to people around the world and get your work done."
  • Don't tell me how to write my novel. Don't tell me you've got a better ending for it. I have no time for that.
  • We should be back on the moon right now. And we should be going off to Mars immediately. … How come we're looking at our shoes instead of at the great nebula in Orion? Where did we mislay the moon and back off from Mars? The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads.
  • If NASA's budgeters could be convinced that there are riches on Mars, we would explode overnight to stand on the rim of the Martian abyss. We need space for reasons we have not as yet discovered, and I don't mean Tupperware. … NASA feels it has to justify everything it does in practical terms.
    And Tupperware was one of the many practical products that came out of space travel. NASA feels it has got to flimflam you to get you to spend money on space. That's B.S. We don't need that. Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.
  • We could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves — that's a real religious activity. That's what space travel can be — relating ourselves to the universe. … NASA is to blame — the entire government is to blame — and the end of the Cold War really pulled the plug, draining any passion that remained.
  • I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.
  • When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life — that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.
  • Unfortunately, I don't think I keep my ego in check very well. I try to remember that my voice is loud, which is an ego problem. But at least I don't suffer from self-deluding identity problem like, say, Carl Sagan does. … With each passing year he grows stiffer because he goes around thinking he's Carl Sagan. Just as Norman Mailer thinks he's Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal thinks he's Gore Vidal. I don't think I'm Ray Bradbury. That's a big distinction. It doesn't matter who you are. You mustn't go around saying who you are, or else you get captured by the mask of false identity. It's the work that identifies you.
  • I don't care what the science fiction trade technicians say, either. They are furious that I get away with murder. I use a scientific idea as a platform to leap into the air and never come back. This keeps them angry at me. They still begrudge my putting an atmosphere on Mars in The Martian Chronicles more than 40 years ago.
  • Summertime, 1950, I recognized Isherwood browsing in a Santa Monica bookstore. My book had just come out, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf, signed it and gave it to him. His face fell and my heart sank, but two days later he called and said, "Do you know what you've done?" I asked, "What?" And he simply told me to read his review in the Times. His rave turned my life around; the book immediately made the best-seller lists and has been in print ever since.
    He was very kind in introducing me to various people he thought I should know, like Aldous Huxley, who had been my literary hero since Brave New World came out.
  • You should read in your own field only when you're young. When I was 8, 10, 12, 16, 25, I read science fiction. But then I went on to Alexander Pope and John Donne and Moliere to mix it up.
  • I foresaw political correctness 43 years ago. … whereas back then I wrote about the tyranny of the majority, today I'd combine that with the tyranny of the minorities. These days, you have to be careful of both. They both want to control you. … I say to both bunches, Whether you're a majority or minority, bug off! To hell with anybody who wants to tell me what to write. Their society breaks down into subsections of minorities who then, in effect, burn books by banning them. All this political correctness that's rampant on campuses is B.S. You can't fool around with the dangerous notion of telling a university what to teach and what not to.
  • The news is all rapes and murders we didn't commit, funerals we don't attend, AIDS we don't want to catch. All crammed into a quarter of a minute! But at least we still have a hand with which to switch channels or turn off altogether. I tell my lecture audiences to never, ever watch local TV news.
  • Magazines today are almost all stupid and moronic to start with. And it makes me furious that I can't find any articles to read anymore. I used to enjoy Forbes and Fortune, but now the pages are completely cluttered with ads.
  • Most of the writers I know in any field, especially science fiction, grew up late. They're so interested in doing what they do and in their science, they don't think about other things.
  • I was madly in love with Hollywood. … I was so blindly and madly in love with the film and radio business in Hollywood that I didn't realize what a pest I was. George no doubt thought he could get me off his back by using my words for one of the eight-line vignettes he had Gracie close their broadcasts with. I wanted to live that special life forever. When that summer was over, I stopped my inner time clock at the age of 14. Another 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. … And strangely enough, my parents never protested. They just figured I was crazy and that God would protect me. Of course back then you could go around town at night and never risk getting mugged or beaten up.
  • Here a human without a car is a samurai without his sword. I would replace cars wherever possible with buses, monorails, rapid trains — whatever is takes to make pedestrians the center of our society again, and cities worthwhile enough for pedestrians to live in. I don't care what people do with their cars, as long as they give them up three quarters of the time — roughly the amount of time people spend every week superfluously driving places they don't want to go to visit people who don't want to see them.
  • When I was 16, I saw six people die horribly in an accident. I walked home holding on to walls and trees. It took me months to begin to function again. So I don't drive. But whether I drive or not is irrelevant. The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society — cars kill more than wars do. More than 50,000 people will die this year because of them and nobody seems to notice.
  • I feel like I own all the kids in the world because, since I've never grown up myself, all my books are automatically for children. … It's mutual delight and love made manifest. For one thing, kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.
  • Listen, you can't turn really bright people into robots. You can turn dumb people into robots, but that's true in every society and system. I don't know what to do with dumb people, but we must try to educate them along with the sharp kids. You teach a kid to read and write by the second grade, and the rest will take care of itself. To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root — first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you've got the future secured.
  • On my seventieth birthday, when I reflected that so many of my friends were dead or dying, it hit me that it was high time I got more work done. Ever since that time, I have done the active, smart thing by increasing my productivity. I'm not on the rocks or shoals yet, but the last few years have been a devastation of illnesses and deaths of many good friends. [Star Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry was a loss that deeply grieved me.
  • I believe in Darwin and God together. It's all one. It's all mysterious. Look at the universe. It's been here forever. It's totally impossible.
  • Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."
  • I don't believe in the anthropomorphic God. … I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.

Now and Forever (2007)

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Page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Harper, ISBN 978-0-06-113157-8, in August 2008, 2nd printing
This is a collection of two novellas
Italics and formatting as in the book
  • “Ain’t there a real fine smell?” said the taxi driver. “Just delivered five dozen loaves!”
    “That,” said the young man, “is the perfume of Eden on the first morn.”
    • Somewhere a Band is Playing, Chapter 3 (p. 17)
  • “You implying I’m a mile off from the truth?”
    “I’m only implying,” Cardiff said, “that we are at a taffy pull. I’m waiting to see how far you pull it.”
    • Chapter 11 (pp. 42-43)
  • “I suspect,” said Elias Culpepper, “you are in need of a drink.”
    “Two,” said Cardiff, “would be fine.”
    • Chapter 15 (p. 54)
  • “I learned long ago you lean one way, me and the other. You were always wrong, I was always right. I hate liars.”
    “‘Optimists’ is the word you want.”
    “No wonder I hate you. The world’s a cesspool and you keep swimming in it, heading for shore. Dear God, where is the shore? You’ll never find it because the shore doesn’t exist! We’re rats drowning in a sewer, but you see lighthouses where there are none. You claim the Titanic is Mark Twain’s steamboat. To you Svengali, Raskolnikov, and Hitler were the Three Stooges! I feel sorry for you. So I’m here to make you honest.”
    “Since when have you believed in honesty?”
    “Honesty, currency, and common sense. Never play funhouse slot machines, don’t toss red-hot pennies to the poor, or throw your landlady downstairs. Fine futures? Hell, the future’s now, and it’s rotten.”
    • Chapter 20 (pp. 67-68)
  • News junkies love to read about others misery.
    • Chapter 21 (p. 73)
  • Cardiff read these words: HOPE MEMORIAL LIBRARY. And in small letters beneath that: KNOW HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.
    • Chapter 24 (p. 82)
  • Since we have been gifted with long lives, the least we can do is pass that gift on in inanimate objects—novels, poems, plays—books that rouse to life when scanned by a living eye. You must never receive a gift, ever, without returning the gift twice over. From Jesus of Nazareth to noon tomorrow, our baggage is the library and its silent speech. Each book is Lazarus, yes? And you the reader, by opening the covers, bid Lazarus to come forth. And he lives again, it lives again, the dead words warmed by your glance.
    • Chapter 24 (p. 87)
  • “No!” someone else cried, and a dozen others whispered, “No!”
    “That’s not possible,” someone said.
    “Anything,” said Cardiff, quietly, “in government, is possible.”
    • Chapter 25 (p. 88)
  • On my world, such comets are known as pilgrim visitors, far-traveling specters, haunters of the feast. You see? Our history has as much romantic nonsense as yours.
    • Leviathan '99, Chapter 3 (p. 165)
  • Small man, great traveling doom—both weigh the same when the scale is death.
    • Chapter 3 (p. 170)
  • “Why then you’re as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust ’reality’ and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings. Lie down with machines, rise up castrato. Sweet Jesus, you’ll make the pope’s choir yet. Such innocent quakes my bones.”
    • Chapter 3 (p. 171)
  • We poisoned it with laughter. All around within it we rose, we fell, we rose again, mystified by Fate, hysterical with chance. We fired our laughs like cannons at its heart!
    • Chapter 5 (p. 181)
  • Thus they and theirs, and we and ours will shadow-show eternity, two films projected to opposite screens and nothing and nothing and nothing in between.
    • Chapter 6 (p. 189)

The New York Times (2009)

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"A Literary Legend Fights for a Local Library", Jennifer Steinhauer, The New York Times, June 19, 2009
  • Libraries raised me. 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.
  • Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet."

The Paris Review interview (2010)

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Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203 interviewed by Sam Geller, in The Paris Review No. 192, (Spring 2010)
  • Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. 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. 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.
  • Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. … If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually 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. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic.
  • New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.
  • 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.
  • When I was seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt — all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction — but my big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. I’ve found that I’m a lot like Verne — a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo — who in a way is the flip side of Melville’s madman, Ahab — goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.
  • I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don’t publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don’t you have a novel?
  • My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well. I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say, How’d she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together? I was an intense student.
  • I just can’t imagine being in a world and not being fascinated with what ideas are doing to us.
  • You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do — and they don’t. They have prejudices.
  • Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school.
  • I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry about the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit’s spout. And I came upon a section toward the end where Ahab stands at the rail and says: “It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.” I turned back to the start: “Call me Ishmael.” I was in love! You fall in love with poetry. You fall in love with Shakespeare. I’d been in love with Shakespeare since I was fourteen. I was able to do the job not because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
    • On reading Moby-Dick for the first time, just prior to writing the screenplay for John Huston's film adaptation of the novel.
  • The problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.
  • My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.
  • I can work anywhere.
  • As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn’t quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.
  • Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things.
  • I write all the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I’m going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me. When they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and trap them before they’re gone. That’s the whole secret: to do things that excite you.
  • Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that I’m not responsible for any of this. It’s from God. And I’m so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is “at play in the fields of the Lord.” It’s been wonderful fun and I’ll be damned where any of it came from. I’ve been fortunate. Very fortunate.
  • I don’t understand writers who have to work at it. I like to play. I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.
  • I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing.
  • Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is “Beauty and the Beast.” That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too.
  • In that film Love Story, there’s a line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other.
  • The need for romance is constant, and again, it’s pooh-poohed by intellectuals. As a result they’re going to stunt their kids. You can’t kill a dream. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure, and romance. It’s like my friend Mr. Electrico. … he was a real man. That was his real name. Circuses and carnivals were always passing through Illinois during my childhood and I was in love with their mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was twelve years old, the Dill Brothers Combined Shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sat in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. … Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I’m glad you’re back in my life. I said, What do you mean? I don’t know you. He said, You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.
    Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that’s what attracted him.
    When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio,” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped.
    Seventy-seven years ago, and I’ve remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.” And I decided to.


Misattributed

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  • There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
    • Actually a statement by Joseph Brodsky, as quoted in The Balancing Act : Mastering the Competing Demands of Leadership (1996) by Kerry Patterson, p. 437.
    • However, compare to the similar Bradbury quotes from 1993 (Seattle Times) and 2000 (Peoria Journal) above.

Quotes about Bradbury

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Bradbury is in love with love. ~ John Blake
Sorted alphabetically by author or source
 
He says faith is necessary but that we should accept the fact that when it comes to God, none of us know anything. ~ Sam Weller
  • Bradbury has been called a Unitarian, but he rejects that term. He dislikes labels of any kind.
    "I'm a Zen Buddhist if I would describe myself," he says. "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." … Allusions to Christianity are common in his stories, but Bradbury doesn't define himself as a Christian. He considers Jesus a wise prophet, like Buddha and Confucius… "Jesus is a remarkable person … He was on his way to becoming Christ, and he made it."
    • John Blake, in "Sci-fi legend "Ray Bradbury on God, 'monsters and angels'" CNN : Living (2 August 2010)
  • Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction …
    Probably no other writer in this book could I get away with introducing in that way. But who in the civilized, book-reading world doesn't know the name Ray Bradbury? When the time came to write a few words to preface Ray, I suddenly was struck with the impossibility of the act. There have been whole treatises written on Bradbury, his poetic images, his humanity, his blue period, his chrome period … who the hell was I to write about him?
    Well, I'm a Bradbury fan, and that's not bad for openers. … Ray Bradbury is very probably better than we ever imagined him to be in our wildest promotion of him as the first sf writer to escape the ghetto and win approbation from such as Isherwood, Wilder, Fadiman, Algren, Gilbert Highet, Graham Greene, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffault and Bertrand Russell, for God's sake!
    Let's face it, fellow sf readers, we've been living off Ray Bradbury's success for twenty years. Every time we try to hype some non-believer into accepting sf and fantasy as legitimate literature, we refer him or her to the works of Ray Bradbury. Who the hell else have we produced who has approached the level of Bradbury for general acceptance? I mean, there's a Viking Portable Library edition of RAY BRADBURY. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov are well-known and much-beloved, but if you go out on the street and buttonhole the average shmendrik, and ask him to name a dozen famous American writers, if he isn't a dullard who'd name Erich Segal and Leon Uris and Jacqueline Whatshername, he'll rattle off Hemingway, Steinbeck, Mickey Spillane, maybe Faulkner, and very probably Bradbury. That's a load of ego-boost for all of us, and it's about time someone said it. When we do the conversion bit with scoffers, we whirl them over to the meager sf racks in most bookstores and we may find no Delany, no Lafferty, no Knight or Disch or Dickson, but by God we always find The Martian Chronicles.
    And we say, "Here try this. You'll love it."     … I mean come on, all you smartass literary cynics who make points off other men's careers, can you ever really forget that thing that called to the foghorn from the sea? … I'll just tag out by saying Ray Bradbury is a man who has written some 300 stories …wrote the screenplay for John Huston's production of Moby Dick… wrote a "space age cantata" dealing with the possible images of Christ on other worlds, Christus Apollo, music by Jerry Goldsmith, and he is a very good, kind, committed man who was in no small part responsible for getting LBJ booted out of office.
    And he's the only man whose poetry I would have included in this, a book of stories. Well, maybe Robert Graves …
  • I knew Ray Bradbury off and on since 1980 when, as a student at the American Film Institute Center, I was asked if I could pick him up and bring him to school for his seminar. You see, Ray never learned how to drive.
    But he knew very well how to give encouragement and enthusiasm to anyone.
  • Ray Bradbury was never one of my favorite authors: He’s a little soft, kind of romantic, and, worst of all, moralizing. But The Martian Chronicles is a great book.
  • (Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored...for me, the greatest discovery of my childhood reading life: Ray Bradbury...Ray became my literary father. He was the one who taught me about the world, and he was a great teacher. I think every 12-year-old should read him (and every adult as well, but 12-year-olds are so much better readers). “Fahrenheit 451” is an American classic and a work of genius, and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” is my favorite of his books, small-town magic. I loved them all and still do. I admired Ray as a writer and a person and wish he was still here with us.
  • I spent one entire summer reading Ray Bradbury...I remained in Ray Bradbury's world for as long as possible. It was a place where it was possible to recognize good from evil, darkness from light. I was a cynical kid, and I didn't have much faith in the world, but I trusted Ray Bradbury. I took everything he said personally. (p 33)
  • I think Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is one of the most extraordinary works of fantasy ever written in the English language.
    • Christopher Isherwood, in an interview in the summer of 1960, published as "A Conversation on Tape" by Stanley Poss, in London Magazine (June 1961)
  • ("How much do you have to know about science to write science fiction?") It is good to know something about at least one field, so that you know how scientists think and how science is done, if you're going to have a any science or even any pseudo-science in your stories. But there is a requirement: that a science fiction writer be interested in science. He may hate it; I think Ray Bradbury hates it. I know he hates technology, and I rather think he hates science. But he's interested in it. It's got down into his subconscious and it comes up in the form of horrors and monsters. But he takes it seriously.
  • Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, despite its incoherencies, is a lovely, enduring book.


See also

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