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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   quotes 17   likes

Ray Bradbury Quotes

“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.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“I'm inclined to believe you need the psychiatrist.”

Ray Bradbury

“Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.”

Ray Bradbury

Now and Forever

Summer

“We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.”

Ray Bradbury

As quoted in "Sci-fi legend "Ray Bradbury on God, 'monsters and angels'" by John Blake, CNN : Living (2 August 2010), p. 3

God , War , Universe

“And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 235

Summer

“The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar;
A moment terrible to hear.”

Ray Bradbury

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

“Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 74

Women , God , Children , Imagination

“I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.”

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury interview http://lists.topica.com/lists/gsn-newsday-list/read/message.html?sort=t&mid=911788456 March 23, 2005

Science

“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

As quoted in Ray Bradbury: The Uncensored Biography (2006) by Gene Beley, p. 284

Love , Time

“A single face turned upward toward all Time
One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.”

Ray Bradbury

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

Peace , Time

“Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time— And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.”

Ray Bradbury

Salon.com (29 August 2001)

Men , People , Game , Time

“More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it’s too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing, a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and—irritable murder.”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Touched With Fire (1954)
The October Country (1955)

Cooking

“He stood very straight and thought of nothing, or at least thought of thinking nothing.”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Homecoming (1946)
The October Country (1955)

Thinking

“Don't tell me how to write my novel. Don't tell me you've got a better ending for it. I have no time for that.”

Ray Bradbury

Playboy interview (1996)

Time

“Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings,
In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.”

Ray Bradbury

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

Birth , Sleep

“Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you’re twenty.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 147

Age , Intelligence

“I believe,” said the first lady, “that our souls are in our hands. For we do everything to the world with our hands. Sometimes I think we don’t use our hands half enough; it’s certain we don’t use our heads.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

Embroidery (1951)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

World , Soul , Thinking

“Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Hate , World , Home

“In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.”

Ray Bradbury

Playboy interview (1996)

Dreams , Imagination , Problem , Science

“THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Epigraph
The October Country (1955)

People , Autumn , Thinking , Sun

“Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."”

Ray Bradbury

Playboy interview (1996)

Religion , Science

“The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land.”

Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles

Rocket Summer (1950)
The Martian Chronicles (1950)

Winter , Summer

“I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I’ve got what amounts to a religion, now.”

Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles

—And the Moon Be Still as Bright (1948)
The Martian Chronicles (1950)

Religion , Fight

““And what happened next?”
“Silence happened next. God, it was beautiful.””

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

The Murderer (1953)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

God , Beauty , Silence

“I’m not afraid. When you live as long as I’ve lived, you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I’d never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can’t say I’m greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don’t fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 150

Life , Death , Fear , Birthday

“Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Coda (1979)

Books , Fear , Hell , Reading

“Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 134

People

“I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?”

Ray Bradbury

"Why Cartoons Are Forever", Los Angeles Times (3 December 1989)

Men , Hope , Waiting

“When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life — that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.”

Ray Bradbury

Playboy interview (1996)

Life , Way , Learning

“Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye.”

Ray Bradbury book R Is for Rocket

Here There Be Tygers (1951)
R Is for Rocket (1962)

Night

“Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.”

Ray Bradbury

"A Miracle of Rare Device", in Playboy (January 1962)

People

“We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe…. If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal.”

Ray Bradbury

Speech to National School Board Association (1995)

Life , Star , Universe

“The news is all rapes and murders we didn't commit, funerals we don't attend, AIDS we don't want to catch. All crammed into a quarter of a minute! But at least we still have a hand with which to switch channels or turn off altogether. I tell my lecture audiences to never, ever watch local TV news.”

Ray Bradbury

Playboy interview (1996)

“A life's work should be based on love.”

Ray Bradbury

Barnes & Nobel Santa Monica Promenade Book Signing (2008)[citation needed]

Love , Life

“All floated upon an evening carrousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely haunted by television.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

The Wilderness (1952)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

Music , Housing

“Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine.
“I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

Powerhouse (1948)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

Love , Children , People

“Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.”

Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles

Ylla (1950)
The Martian Chronicles (1950)

Marriage , People

“Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.”

Ray Bradbury

Speech at Brown University (1995)

World

“Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. … If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past — a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic.”

Ray Bradbury

The Paris Review interview (2010)

God , World , Way , Idea

“The gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.”

Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles

There Will Come Soft Rains (1950)
The Martian Chronicles (1950)

God , Religion

“It will only take a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
“I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”

Ray Bradbury book R Is for Rocket

Uncle Einar (1947)
R Is for Rocket (1962)

“Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 71

“I’ve alway known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It’s essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don’t know.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 151

Love , Knowledge , Waiting , Sun

“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

"Ray Bradbury hates big government: ‘Our country is in need of a revolution’" in The Los Angeles Times : Hero Complex (16 August 2010) http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/08/16/ray-bradbury-is-sick-of-big-government-our-country-is-in-need-of-a-revolution/

“I write fantasy. The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.”

Ray Bradbury
Art , Science

“Will sensed a stir in Jim's house; Jim, too, with his fine dark antennae, must have felt the waters part high over town to let a Leviathan pass.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), Chapter 29

Sense , Water , Parting , Housing

“No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Variant: “You remember winning, don’t you? A battle won, somewhere?”
“No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.
Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 85

War , Sadness , Time

“On the whole, the change had done Huxley a share of good. Death made him a handsomer man to deal with. You could talk to him now and he’d have to listen.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (1948)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

Death , Change