Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.
I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can't do that on a computer.
The terrible tyranny of the majority.
I've often been accused of being too emotional and sentimental, but I believe in honest sentiment, and the need to purge ourselves at certain times, which is ancient. Men would live at least five or six more years and not have ulcers if they could cry better.
I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.
I love the musical form of books. It's a different way of doing things, it's very beautiful. You're able to sing things instead of saying them. So what the heck -- why not do them?
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again--to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
There are a lot of wonderful women writers who would be good influences on writers. You've got to spread yourself out and educate yourself with all kinds of stories.
Life shoould be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at other move forward with it.
I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.
May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Just write every day of your life. Read intensely.
Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
My gosh, if you're going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would've talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!
In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
Sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
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.
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.
Lone at night, when I was twelve years old, I looked at the planet Mars and I said, 'Take me home!' And the planet Mars took me home, and I never came back. So I've written every day in the last 75 years. I've never stopped writing.
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.
Who ever heard of a Martian not invading? Who!
The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his sense, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events.
Far away, in the meadow, shadows flickered in the Mirror's Maze, as if parts of someone's life, yet unborn, were trapped there, waiting to be lived.
We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.
Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.
We're going to become the martians when we land there. When we explore and build communities, we become the martians. That's a wonderful destiny for all of us.
I'm trying to teach people of all ages to, number one: how to criticize, how to offer creative analysis on top of that, how to try to build things in a new direction and how to compliment people when the thing gets done.
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.
I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour.
All isn't well with the world.
Action is hope. There is no hope without action.
Far away in the cool dim empty rooms of the big old house, a silver bell tinkled and faded.
Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.
That's sad, said Montag, quietly, because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know.
Christ, you could massacre half a Hindu village and still look like Peter Rabbit. What are you stuffed with?
Chocolate bars. And I keep six kinds of ice-cream in my icebox, when I can afford it.
Men are men, unfortunately, no matter what their shape, and inclined to sin.
Will we ever stop being afraid of nights and death?
When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.
Don't live on your goddamn computers, and the internet, and all that crap. Go to the library. Don't let them flim-flam you into owning all these devices.
Whoever he was or whatever he was and no matter how different and crazy he seemed, he was not crazy.
But I wanted to show what we all have in us, that it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice. When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange -- we are so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.
But here I was with hardly a sign of any outward conflict. It was all running around in spiked boots inside my head, making cuts and bruises where no one could see them except me and a psychologist. But it was just as bad.
I am a passionate, not an intellectual writer, which means my characters must plunge ahead of me to live the story.
You could see her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish -- some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy, and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being nothing but colour and nothing else.
The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?
Don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.
We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.
Without the library, you have no civilization.
Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.
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.
The bigger the population, the more minorities.
Longer Version:
The bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico...The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did...There you have it Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.
Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.
Then, of course, the telephone's such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn't want to be called.
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.
We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back.
Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.
If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.
And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with the eyes of puff adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out the door.
Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.
Life should be touched, not strangled.
Everyone has a telephone. Whether they can afford it or not. It's one of those things that people have, regardless of their income.
An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.
The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
Let me make it clear. People die every day, psychologically speaking. Some part of them gets tired.
The local TV news is the greatest danger in your life. It's all crap.
All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It's my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset, I've won or lost. At sunrise, I'm out again, giving it the old try.
How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.
Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!
Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day, every day, sleeping its life away.
Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading.
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?
I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers -- to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.
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.
That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts.
Sandwich outdoors isn't a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.
We're a free society; we've got television. We have radio. We have newspapers. We have the videocassette, which is coming into play. These are new freedoms.
Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
There was a smell like a cut potato from all the land, raw and cold and white from having the moon on it most of the night.