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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

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Question

“Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 223

World , Grandma

“The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.”

Ray Bradbury

Foreword to A Passion for Books (1999) by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan

Life , Women , Education , Teachers

“Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Ray Bradbury

The New York Times (2009)

Money , School , Universe

“I can work anywhere.”

Ray Bradbury

The Paris Review interview (2010)

“I took the candy wrappers shamefacedly, and felt the extra ten pounds sag around my middle as I held these flags of defeat.”

Ray Bradbury

“We all just gave up on that and stayed friends.”

Ray Bradbury

“Will power is the answer. Will power. No white bread, no Nestle's Crunch bars… I flinched and felt the last of the bars melting in my pockets.”

Ray Bradbury

“I’m working on a screenplay of Fahrenheit 451 that will star Mel Gibson. It will be better than the original because they left a lot of things out of the first film. … It works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can’t say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It’s thought control and freedom of speech control.”

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury Talk Likely to Feature the Unexpected (1994)

Star , Thinking , Freedom

“I didn’t write Fahrenheit 451 about us. I wrote it about Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler. … I may not even talk about book banning if I don’t feel like it. I don’t prepare anything ahead. I have a dozen subjects to talk about because I write plays and poetry and essays, short stories and novels and screenplays and teleplays and operas. I’ll get lost, and the audience will have a wonderful time. And I’ll get a standing ovation, and they’ll go home.”

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury Talk Likely to Feature the Unexpected (1994)

Home , Books , Feeling , Time

“You remember winning, don’t you? A battle won, somewhere?”

Ray Bradbury book R Is for Rocket

“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.
The Time Machine (1955)
R Is for Rocket (1962)

“I don’t understand writers who have to work at it. I like to play. I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.”

Ray Bradbury

The Paris Review interview (2010)

Idea , Understanding

“Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back hoping and waiting until—bang!”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

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

Waiting , Night , People , Hope

“I don't believe in the anthropomorphic God. … I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.”

Ray Bradbury

Playboy interview (1996)

God , Daughters , Soul

“I’m a magician who writes about ideas. I’m not a science-fiction writer. People who call me that are wrong. Most of what I write is fantasy or magic realism or plays about my Mexican-American background.”

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury Talk Likely to Feature the Unexpected (1994)

Idea , Science , People

“I am the dreamer and the doer
I the hearer and the knower
I the giver and the taker
I the sword and the wound of sword.
If this be true, then let sword fall free from hand.
I embrace myself.
I laugh until I weep
And weep until I smile…”

Ray Bradbury

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

Smile

“Man warring on himself an old tale is;
But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow in himself,
Finding his left hand and his right
Are similar sons, are children fighting
In the porchyards of the void?!”

Ray Bradbury

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

Fight , War , Children

“Why have you been so blind?
Why have you never seen?
The slave and master in one skin
Is all your history, no more, no less,
Confess! This is what you've been.”

Ray Bradbury

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

History

“You are the jailer and the jailed,
You the impaler and the one that your own
Million-fleshed self in dreams by night
do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill.”

Ray Bradbury

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

Self-confidence , Dreams , Night

“Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair
Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear
And say out prayers that most need saying
For needful sinners who've forgotten praying;
And in every alcove and niche you spy
The living dead who envy the long since gone
Who never wished to die.”

Ray Bradbury

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

Envy , Dead

“And what happened next?”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

“Silence happened next. God, it was beautiful.”

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

“We clothe ourselves in flame
And trade new myths for old.
The Greek gods christen us
With ghosts of comet swords;
God smiles and names us thus:
Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!”

Ray Bradbury

"We March Back to Olympus" in Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns (1977), p. 11

Smile , Clothes , God , Flying

“All flesh is one: what matter scores;
Or color of the suit
Or if the helmet glints with blue or gold?
All is one bold achievement,
All is fine spring-found-again-in-autumn day
When juices run in antelopes along our blood, And green our flag, forever green…”

Ray Bradbury

"All flesh is one: what matter scores?" in When Elephants Last In The Dooryard Bloomed : Celebrations For Almost Any Day In The Year (1973)

Autumn , Color , Spring

“I write fantasy. The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451.”

Ray Bradbury

It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.
A Conversation with Ray Bradbury - Point Loma Nazarene University, Writer's Symposium By The Sea; April, 2001 http://www.cosmolearning.com/videos/a-conversation-with-ray-bradbury-2001-1131/

Science

“The days of the Long Cold are done. Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in the winter cave.”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

Source: The Halloween Tree (1972), Chapter 10 (p. 73)

Thinking , Summer , Winter

“O autumn winds that bake and burn
And all the world to darkness turn,
Now storm and seize and make of me…
A swarm of leaves from Autumn’s Tree!”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

Source: The Halloween Tree (1972), Chapter 11 (p. 79)

Tree , Autumn , World

“The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile.”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

Source: The Halloween Tree (1972), Chapter 7 (p. 50)

Smile , Grass

“It’s big, it’s broad…
It’s broad, it’s bright…
It fills the sky of All Hallow’s Night…
The strangest sight you’ve ever seen.
The Monster Tree on Halloween.”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

Source: The Halloween Tree (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 28-29)

Tree , Night