Quotes from Ray Bradbury

I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those darn five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there'd be no night!

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

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.

He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

Who are your friends? Do they believe in you? Or do they stunt your growth with ridicule and disbelief? If the latter, you haven't friends. Go find some.

Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before death is what counts.

Are you happy? she [Clarisse] said. Am I what? he [Montag] cried. But she was gone- running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.

It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.

When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?

Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly.

And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between.

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

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.

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.

I have three rules to live by: Get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin, and when all else fails, run like hell.

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.

I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously. [ Writer's Digest Interview (Robert Jacobs, Writer's Digest , February 1976)]

The Lord is not serious. In fact, it is a little hard to know just what else He is except loving. And love has to do with humor, doesn't it? For you cannot love someone unless you put up with him, can you? And you cannot put up with someone constantly unless you can laugh at him. Isn't that true? And certainly we are rediculous little animals wallowing in the fudge bowl, and God must love us all the more because we appeal to his humor.

This was all he wanted now. Some signs that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time he needed to think all the things that must be thought.

I shall remain on Mars and read a book.

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

I don't talk things, sir,' said Faber. 'I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive.