Quotes from Ray Bradbury

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. You always dread the unfamiliar.

Usted no es como los demás. He visto a unos cuantos. Lo sé. Cuando hablo usted me mira. Anoche, cuando dije algo sobre la luna, usted la miró. Los otros nunca harían eso. Los otros se alejarían, dejándome con la palabra en la boca. O me amenazarían. Nadie tiene ya tiempo para nadie.

Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes. Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.

Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating. Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.

I miss that in the city you can walk outside your front door and there's people all around you. And they don't know a thing about you.You could be anyone.

Take it where you can find it, in old photograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.

When a man talks from the heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

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. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.

I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them.

Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think—the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then he looked on ahead. "But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say." And

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.

Young man,' she said to Bill Forrester, 'you are a person of taste and imagination. Also, you have the will power of ten men; otherwise you would not dare veer away from the common flavors listed on the menu and order, straight out, without quibble or reservation, such an unheard-of things as lime-vanilla ice.' He bowed his head solemnly to her. 'Come sit with me, both of you,' she said. 'We'll talk of strange ice creams and such things as we seem to have a bent for.

They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, 'Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.

Fire is bright and fire is clean

I don't want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?

You really expect answers to your calling when you are young. You feel that whatever you may think can be real. And some times maybe that is not so wrong.

Way late at night Will had heard—how often?—train whistles jetting steam along the rim of sleep, forlorn, alone and far, no matter how near they came. Sometimes he woke to find tears on his cheek, asked why, lay back, listened and thought, Yes! they make me cry, going east, going west, the trains of far gone in country deeps they drown in tides of sleep that escape the towns.

She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why.

The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.

The sun burnt everyday. It burnt time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people away, without any help from him.

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.

And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?