Ray Bradbury Quotes

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I took pictures of Myrna Loy and Joel McCrea in front of the studios. I loved Hollywood. I have 500 autographs and 500 photographs I took.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I'd like to spend more time with her.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

I've only written one science-fiction book: 'Fahrenheit 451.' That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

- Ray Bradbury

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

- Ray Bradbury

All of my writing is God-given.

- Ray Bradbury

We're all dreamers.

- Ray Bradbury

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn't exist. TV didn't exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

- Ray Bradbury

If you are going to describe the history of animation, you'd look at the early Disney work, then 'Bugs Bunny,' 'Road Runner' and other Warner Brothers theatrical productions. But when you got to 'Rocky and Bullwinkle,' you'd see they were unique: They assumed you had a brain in your head.

- Ray Bradbury

If I'd found out that Norman Mailer liked me. I'd have killed myself.

- Ray Bradbury

First grade is very cheap. It's the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don't do it right.

- Ray Bradbury

Electronic books are junk.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

I find it amusing that I'm on the Internet now, because I've criticized it, but mainly I've criticized it on the basis of, 'What are you going to do with it?'

- Ray Bradbury

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

- Ray Bradbury

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

I think we're doing a dreadful job of educating.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

- Ray Bradbury

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

- Ray Bradbury

I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money.

- Ray Bradbury

I don't go around thinking I'm Ray Bradbury all the time.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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?

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

The Internet is a big distraction.

- Ray Bradbury

There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.

- Ray Bradbury

I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

If you're embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn't include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.

- Ray Bradbury

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

- Ray Bradbury

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

- Ray Bradbury

I don't believe in colleges and universities.

- Ray Bradbury

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

- Ray Bradbury

I don't need to be vindicated, and I don't want attention.

- Ray Bradbury

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

I don't do research. I never have.

- Ray Bradbury

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

- Ray Bradbury

My favorite writers have been those who've said things well.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

Libraries raised me.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

Facts are not interesting to me.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

- Ray Bradbury

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.

- Ray Bradbury

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

- Ray Bradbury

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

- Ray Bradbury

You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.

- Ray Bradbury

I don't see myself as a philosopher. That's awfully boring.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

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.

- Ray Bradbury

We've got to dumb America up again.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

If an idea isn't exciting, you shouldn't do it.

- Ray Bradbury

You fail only if you stop writing.

- Ray Bradbury

Books are alive, you see. They're not dead, they're alive.

- Ray Bradbury

I felt a bit bookish, cut off from life.

- Ray Bradbury

I've been afraid of people playing their life away with too many toys.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

My business is to prevent the future.

- Ray Bradbury

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Ray Bradbury

The important thing is to be in love with something.

- Ray Bradbury