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Ray Bradbury Quotes
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Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. He worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction.

Predominantly known for writing the iconic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 , and his science-fiction and horror-story collections, The Martian Chronicles , The Illustrated Man , and I Sing the Body Electric , Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers. While most of his best known work is in fantasy fiction, he also wrote in other genres, such as the coming-of-age novel Dandelion Wine and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale .

Recipient of numerous awards, including a 2007 Pulitzer Citation, Bradbury also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted to comic book, television, and film formats.

Upon his death in 2012, The New York Times called Bradbury "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream". Wikipedia  

✵ 22. August 1920 – 5. June 2012
Ray Bradbury photo
Ray Bradbury: 401 quotes18 likes

Ray Bradbury Quotes

“Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.”

Ray Bradbury

“The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 62

“Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“That's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and WORTH the doing.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.”

Ray Bradbury

“Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”

Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles

Source: The Martian Chronicles

“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.”

Ray Bradbury

“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.”

Ray Bradbury

“I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine

“When they give you lined paper, write the other way.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Misattributed
Variant: If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
Source: Epigraph, in Fahrenheit 451 a translation of a statement by Juan Ramón Jiménez

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

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“Libraries raised me.”

Ray Bradbury

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

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine

“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.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“A book is a loaded gun.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Part 1
Variant: A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.
Source: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

“Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.”

Ray Bradbury

“You fail only if you stop writing.”

Ray Bradbury

“No person ever died that had a family.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine

“The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“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”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Usher II (1950)
The Martian Chronicles (1950)
Source: Fahrenheit 451
Context: They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; 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.

“Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Variant: Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before death is what counts.
Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.”

Ray Bradbury Farewell Summer

Source: Farewell Summer

“Are you happy?”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day..”

Ray Bradbury

“Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? 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?”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“There was her face, like a summer peach, beautiful and warm, and the light of the candles reflected in her dark eyes. [He] held his breath. The entire world waited and held its breath.”

Ray Bradbury

“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?”

Ray Bradbury

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

“The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine

“I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why…. Luckily, queer ones like her don't happen often.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?”

Ray Bradbury

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Source: The October Country

“I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.”

Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles

Source: The Martian Chronicles

“For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead… We're nothing more than dust jackets for books… so many pages to a person…”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago.
For a little while I'm not afraid.
Maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing at last.
Maybe it's because I've done a rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451