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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

“The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water…. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water….”

Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles

Source: The Martian Chronicles

“And metaphors like cats behind your smile,
Each one wound up to purr,
each one a pride,
Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (…)”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“Coloured people don't like. Burn it. White people don't feel good about. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. ("Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")”

Ray Bradbury book Long After Midnight

Source: Long After Midnight

“From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.”

Ray Bradbury book The Illustrated Man

Source: The Illustrated Man

“Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“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.”

Ray Bradbury

Source: Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews

“I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously."

[(Robert Jacobs,, February 1976)]”

Ray Bradbury

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered… sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks…”

Ray Bradbury

“Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but perfume to me.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“People don't talk about anything… No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

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

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“You take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That's you [our son].”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), Chapter 28

“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.”

Ray Bradbury

“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.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“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.”

Ray Bradbury

“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.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“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.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“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.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine

“I'd like to know what a place iswhen I'm. I'd like to be.”

Ray Bradbury book The Illustrated Man

Source: The Illustrated Man

“There must me something in books, things we can't imagine.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Variant: There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house.
Source: Fahrenheit 451

“Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Variant: Those who don't build must burn.
Source: Fahrenheit 451

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

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“So in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do, depending on the season and the need.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“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!?”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“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.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.”

Ray Bradbury

“Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

Source: The Halloween Tree

“Good to evil seems evil”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“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.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.”

Ray Bradbury

BookExpo America, Los Angeles (May 2008). Reported in USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-06-01-1819108364_x.htm (June 1, 2008) and The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/03/news.amazon (3 June 2008)

“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

“You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“You're peculiar, you're aggravating, yet you're easy to forgive. You say you're seventeen?.. How odd. How strange. And my wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at times. I can't get over it.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.”

Ray Bradbury book Death Is a Lonely Business

Source: Death Is a Lonely Business

“Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.”

Ray Bradbury

Source: I Sing the Body Electric! & Other Stories

“It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book… it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt…”

Ray Bradbury

“A computer does not smell… if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.”

Ray Bradbury

“Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.”

Ray Bradbury

“But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451