Ray Bradbury: Likeness (page 2)

“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

Truth , Way

“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

World

“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

“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

Life

“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)

Books , Future

“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

Books

“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

“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

“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

“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

“We all love toys. I'm toy oriented. I write about toys. I've got a lot of toys. Hundreds of things. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative. … People are talking about the Internet as a creative tool for writers. I say, "B. S. Stay away from that. Stop talking to people around the world and get your work done."”

Ray Bradbury

Playboy interview (1996)

Love , Men , People , World

“Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Variant: Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.
Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 81

Men , People , Lie , Waiting

“There they go, off to Venus, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.”

Ray Bradbury

"A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles", in Rhodomagnetic Digest (May 1950)

Thinking , Reading , Future

“The telephone rang like a spoiled brat.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

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

“Summertime, 1950, I recognized Isherwood browsing in a Santa Monica bookstore. My book had just come out, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf, signed it and gave it to him. His face fell and my heart sank, but two days later he called and said, "Do you know what you've done?" I asked, "What?" And he simply told me to read his review in the Times. His rave turned my life around; the book immediately made the best-seller lists and has been in print ever since.
He was very kind in introducing me to various people he thought I should know, like Aldous Huxley, who had been my literary hero since Brave New World came out.”

Ray Bradbury

On the chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood just after publication of The Martian Chronicles which led to fame and acclaim outside of SF fandom.
Playboy interview (1996)

Life , People , Books , World

“At the center of religion is love. I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love.”

Ray Bradbury

As quoted in "Sci-fi legend "Ray Bradbury on God, 'monsters and angels'" by John Blake, CNN : Living (2 August 2010) http://articles.cnn.com/2010-08-02/living/Bradbury_1_ray-bradbury-dandelion-wine-sam-weller?_s=PM:LIVING, p. 1

Love , Life , People , World

“I feel like I own all the kids in the world because, since I've never grown up myself, all my books are automatically for children. … It's mutual delight and love made manifest. For one thing, kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.”

Ray Bradbury

Playboy interview (1996)

Love , Children , Books , World

“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

“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)