Quotes by Ray Bradbury
(Page 5 of 5)

Why go to a machine when you could go to a human being?

I don't believe in colleges and universities.

I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'

I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count.

There's no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We're all god.

All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn't matter if you have a beautiful face or not.

If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

All of my writing is God-given.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores.

All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

It's lack that gives us inspiration. It's not fullness.

You fail only if you stop writing.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg -- I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country -- we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, 'Do this, do that,' but it's my demon who provokes me.

When you're older you want to learn from other people.

You pay a certain penalty for going your own way. A lot of people think you're nuts, and you're not as popular with girls as you should be.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

I don't control my writing -- it controls me.

'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen.

Look at the Chandra Levy case. It's become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors. They're judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c'mon, that's ridiculous. But they're doing it.

You don't have to turn on the TV set. You don't have to work on the Internet. It's up to you.

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.

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

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.

I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.

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

I'm not a serious person, and I don't like serious people.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves -- you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.