Ray bradbury quotes

A book is a loaded gun.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

Everything is generated through your own will power.

The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.

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

Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.

The important thing of any time you live in is to be in love yourself. You float above your time then. It's what you want that counts, not what your time wants.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

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

Do what you love and love what you do. Don’t do anything for money. Everything should be for love.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.

With school 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.

A life's work should be based on love.

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.

An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.

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.

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

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.

In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.

The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Good to evil seems evil

Action is hope. There is no hope without action.

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.

We are the witnesses to the miracle. We are put here by creation, by God....We're here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

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

I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?) Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

You've been put on the world to love the act of being alive.

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

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.

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

I don't think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don't take the toys out of their hands, we're fools.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.

Get rid of those friends of yours who make fun of you and don't believe in you. And when you leave here tonight, go home, make a phone call and fire them. Anyone that doesn't believe in you and your future, to hell with them.

The important thing is to be in love with something.

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.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while.

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!

You fail only if you stop writing.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. ... I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

The things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love should be things that you do.

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.

People who take books on sex to bed become frigid. You get self-conscious. You can't think a story. You can't think, "I shall do a story to improve mankind." Well, it's nonsense. All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't. A story is the same way. You either feel a story and need to write it, or you better not write it.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

Do what you love, don't do anything else.

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.

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.

Treasure this day and Treasure yourself, truly, neither will ever happen again.

Sunsets are loved because they vanish. Flowers are loved because they go. The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart. These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

Television is very dangerous. Because it repeats and repeats and repeats our disasters, instead of our triumphs.

Creativity is a continual surprise.

Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

If we try to deny the darkness in our souls then we'll become completely dark.

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.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

There is only one type of story in the world-your story.

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.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.

I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.

Don't think about things, just do them; don't predict them, just make them.

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

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

We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.

I don't believe in government. I hate politics. I'm against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

All education is self-discovery.

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.

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

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.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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.

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.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

It's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid.

The local TV news is the greatest danger in your life. It's all crap.

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

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

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.

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

I believe the universe created us - we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious.

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

In order to be creative, you don't have to be original.

I’ve learned that by doing things, things get done.

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness

I don't decide. My secret self decides. I just go with my subconscious. If it wants to do a poem, I do a poem, and if it wants to do a play, I do a play. So I'm not in charge, I'm not in control.

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.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

You can make yourself happy or miserable - it's the same amount of effort.

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

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.

The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you're looking back ... well, it amounts to everything.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

Life is about trying things to see if they work.

I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.