100+ Ray Bradbury Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

source: - "A man who won't forget Ray Bradbury" by Neil Gaiman, www.theguardian.com. June 6, 2012.

quote you can make yourself happy or miserable it s the same amount of effort ray bradbury Quotes

Everything is generated through your own will power. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. This is a democracy. You go where you want to go and do what you want to do.

Topics: Democracy, Want, What You Want, Will Power

Quotation Ray Bradbury We are cups constantly and quietly being filled The trick Quotes

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

source: - FaceBook post by Ray Bradbury from Dec 08, 2014

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Struggle, Martian Chronicles, Inspirational Reading

I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

Topics: Book, Fiction, Fantasy

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Science

Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.

Topics: Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction

I've been writing every day of my life for 65 years.

Topics: Writing, Years, Writing Every Day

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

Topics: Writing, Stories, Week

Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.

Topics: Teaching, Kids, Writing, Lack Of Education, Raise Up

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Topics: Courage, Humor, Greatness, Jumping In, Jumping Off

The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.

Topics: Mean, Years, Gears

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

Topics: Ignorance

I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.

Topics: Believe, Writing, Creative

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Topics: Crazy, Book, Writing, Writing Every Day, Your Crazy

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.

Topics: Lying, Book, Light

I don't believe in government. I hate politics. I'm against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

Topics: Hate, Fall, Believe, Hate Politics, I Hate Politics

Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.

Topics: Philosophy, Ideas, Birth Control, Hydrogen Bomb, Birth Control Pills

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

source: - "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, (pp. 156-157), 1953.

Topics: Children, Wall, Flower, Creative People, My Grandfather

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

source: - "Zen in the Art of Writing". Book by Ray Bradbury, 1990.

Topics: Inspirational, Beautiful, Creativity

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

Topics: Creativity, Writing, Ideas, Warp

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Topics: Inspirational, Writing, Reality, Inspiring Writing, Writers And Writing

I don't believe in colleges and universities.

Topics: Believe, College, University, Self Education, Colleges And Universities

I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Topics: Writing

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

Topics: Dream, Fiction, Mankind

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

Topics: Philosophy, Positive Thinking, Medicine, Sense Of Wonder, Soma

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

Topics: Creativity, Thinking, Self, Amazing Things, Creative People

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?

Topics: Real, Long, Important, Not Bothered

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

source: - Ray Bradbury (2000). “Bradbury Stories”

Topics: Insanity, Bipolar, Insane, Insanity And Sanity, Crazy People

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.

Topics: Letting Go, Should, Learn To Let Go, Strangling, Not Letting Go

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Topics: Inspirational, Dream, Travel, Solo Travel, Martian Chronicles

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.

Topics: Believe, School, College

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.

Topics: Country, Rain, Twilight, Pantry, Attics

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

Topics: Future, Trying, Programming, Describe Myself

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Topics: Real, Cutting, Men, Leaving A Legacy, Creative Person

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.

Topics: Teamwork, Believe, Hard Work, Work Related, Value Of Hard Work

I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Topics: Writing, Ideas, Needs, Alarm Clocks

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

Topics: School, Library, Use, Final Destination

Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.

Topics: Teacher, Inspire, Librarian

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Topics: Inspiring, Trust, Fall, Jumping In, Angel Wings

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.

Topics: Writing, Careers, Pleasant, Great Writing, Writer's Block

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

source: - "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Inspirational, Learning, Wings

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.

Topics: Imagination, Want, What You Want

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

Topics: Writing, Intuition, Way, Inspiration To Write, Inspiring Writing

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Topics: Love, Inspirational, Good Morning, Funny Good Morning, Beautiful Morning

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

Topics: Book, Reading, Past

My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead.

Topics: Order, Years, Numbers

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.

Topics: Men, Two Sides, Worry, Fahrenheit 451 Book

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Topics: Faith, Morning, Teaching, Bursting, Comic Strips

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

Topics: School, Intellectual, Swimmer, Fahrenheit 451 Book, Racers

[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.

Topics: Book, Dark, Library

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.

Topics: Air, People, Looks, Predicting, Predicting The Future

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

source: - FaceBook post by Ray Bradbury from Apr 11, 2014

Topics: Believe, Thinking, Ideas

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

Topics: Writing, Men, Dreamer

Creativity is a continual surprise.

Topics: Creativity, Creative, Surprise

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

Topics: Reading, Cutting, Thinking

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.

Topics: War, Moving, Astronaut

You fail only if you stop writing.

Topics: Writing, Failing, Inspiration To Write, Inspiring Writing

I don't think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don't take the toys out of their hands, we're fools.

Topics: Taken, Men, Thinking

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

Topics: Science, Impossible, Impossibility

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.

Topics: Nice, Book, Smell

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

Topics: Education, Book, College, Public Library

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.

Topics: Sadness, People, Special

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

Topics: Art, Creativity, Cat, Creative People, Creative Ideas

You can make yourself happy or miserable - it's the same amount of effort.

Topics: Happiness, Effort, Miserable, Make Yourself Happy

Sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

Topics: Crazy, Book, Hats

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.

Topics: Teacher, Giving, Speak, Booksellers

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

Topics: Art, Needs, Breathe

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.

Topics: Rivers, Stories, Stopping, Never Stopping

Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.

Topics: Live Life, Answers, Martian Chronicles, Propagation

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

Topics: Death, Loss, Thinking, Martian Chronicles

The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you're looking back ... well, it amounts to everything.

Topics: Happy Life, Years, Doe, Moments In Time

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

Topics: Art, Writing, Self

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

Topics: Writing, Light, White, Great Writing, Prisms

We are the witnesses to the miracle. We are put here by creation, by God....We're here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate.

Topics: Spiritual, Jobs, Miracle

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

Topics: Farenheit 451

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

Topics: Good Night, Sleep, Ice, Chocolate Ice Cream

So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.

Topics: Fear, Scare, Rebel

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

Topics: Writing, Acceptance, Rejection

We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.

Topics: Inspirational, Travel, Romance

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

Topics: Book, Gun, Men, Beatty, Loaded Gun

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.

Topics: Friendship, Inspiring, Potters

Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

Topics: Shadow, Rooms, Poverty

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...

Topics: Summer, Fall, Wine, Snow Falling, Dandelions

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.

Topics: Book, Reading, Color

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

Topics: Father, Writing, Soul, Dry Bones

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

Topics: Inspirational, Travel, Fun, Inspirational Adventure, Inspirational Vacation

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?

Topics: Book, Writing, Sleep

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.

Topics: Sweet, Eye, Soul

That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.

Topics: Hurt, Home, Waiting, Always Waiting

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.

Topics: Thinking, Average, People, Tv Commercial

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

Topics: Mistake, Ignorance, Cutting

Write what you love and love what you write.

Topics: Writing, And Love, Morning Inspirational, Beautiful Morning, Good Morning Inspirational

What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.

Topics: Men, Creative, Muse

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

Topics: World

My job is to help you fall in love.

Topics: Falling In Love, Jobs, Fall

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

Topics: Real, School, Boys, Ancient Egypt

I have two rules in life - to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done.

Topics: Two, Done, Hell

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

Topics: Writing, Bad Word, Billions

Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.

Topics: College, Eight, Age

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Topics: Crazy, Writing, Reality

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

Topics: Book, Smell, Fuel

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.

Topics: Missing, Needs, Missing It, Fahrenheit 451 Book

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college.

Topics: Education, College, Years

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.

Topics: Fall, Perfect, Waiting

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Friendship, Making Friends, Inspirational Friendship

The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.

Topics: Sun, Fireman, Fahrenheit 451 Book

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

Topics: Writing, Quality, Produce, Creative Writing, Writing Life

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.

Topics: Hero, Writing, Firsts, Inspiration To Write, Great Writing

No person ever died that had a family.

Topics: Persons

When a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

Topics: Heart, Men, Speak, Moment Of Truth

If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.

Topics: Teacher, School, Editors, Grammar School

I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it - and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything - so they never get anything.

Topics: People, Want, Wanted

If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.

Topics: Silly, Territory, Primitive, Silly Things

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.

Topics: Uncles, Crazy, Two, Farenheit 451

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

Topics: Space, Individuality, Dinosaurs, Space Travel, Sideshows

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Topics: Running, Writing, Hands

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.

Topics: Halloween, Boys, Months

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Topics: Running, Book, People, Burglars, One Way

A life's work should be based on love.

Topics: Should

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Topics: Art, Writing, Ideas

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Topics: Book, Names, Telephones, Book Of The Dead

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

Topics: Rain, Sleep, Night, Middle Of The Night, Night Thinking

It was a pleasure to burn.

Topics: Chaos, Pleasure

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Topics: Book, Magic, Together, Fahrenheit 451 Book

Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.

Topics: Answers, Mystery

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

Topics: People, Unhappy, Want

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

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Art, Martian Chronicles

Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.

Topics: Brain, Intellectual, Needs

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely.

Topics: Writing

I've never been in charge of my stories, they've always been in charge of me. As each new one has called to me, ordering me to give it voice and form and life, I've followed the advice I've shared with other writers over the years: jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

Topics: Years, Wings, Voice

Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.

Topics: Book, Past, Night, World And Life

I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going.

Topics: People, Watches, Looks

Treasure this day and Treasure yourself, truly, neither will ever happen again.

Topics: Treasure, This Day

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

Topics: Library, Find Me

An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.

Topics: Running, Athlete, Order

We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.

Topics: Beautiful, Men, Earth, Martian Chronicles, Martians

I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. ... I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Topics: Mean, Wrestling, Hysteria

No," said a voice, "the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.

Topics: Night, Voice, World

Suddenly the day was gone, night came out from under each tree and spread.

Topics: Night, Tree, Gone

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

Topics: Writing, Culture, Treasure

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Topics: Art, War, Envy

The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so.

Topics: Writing, Forever, Lasts, Blizzard

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything.

Topics: Love Is, Answers, Reason

The books are to remind us what ***** and fools we are.

Topics: Book, Fool, Ass, Fahrenheit 451 Book

In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Topics: Optimistic, Writing, Mirrors

The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.

Topics: Fever, Peaches, Might, Digging Ditches

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

Topics: Good Morning, Reality, Together, Landmines, Morning After

I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

Topics: Hate, Party, Thinking, Political Parties

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

Topics: Confidence, Courage, Travel, Martian Chronicles, Jumping Off

May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Topics: Next, World, May

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

Topics: Country, Democracy, Way

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

Topics: Dream, Growing Up, Writing

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

Topics: Summer, Children, Hands

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

Topics: Dark, Past, Shadow, Martian Chronicles

Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid.

Topics: Funny, Baby, Stupid

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Topics: Art, War, Writing, Writing Life, Fiction Writers

But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.

Topics: Soul, Lost, Found

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.

Topics: Men, Judging, Mountain, Beatty, Born Free

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Topics: Ignorance, People, World, Willful Ignorance

You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon.

Topics: Love, Moon, Looks, Fireman

He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.

Topics: Nature, Adventure, Land, Filled Up

Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books.....

Topics: Falling In Love, Fall, Book

I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.

source: - Ray Bradbury, Sam Weller (2012). “Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews”, p.306, Melville House

Topics: Running, Fun, Ideas, Up In The Air, Confetti

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.

Topics: Writing, Alive, Firsts

What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

Topics: Writing, Effort, Bird, Quickness

Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!

Topics: Running, Three, Done, Gin, When All Else Fails

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?

Topics: Life, Country, Rain

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

Topics: Ideas, Next, Energy

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!?

Topics: Book, Sky, Rivers, Cairo

The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats. Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.

Topics: Cat, Cutting, Night, Gourds, Sidewalk

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.

Topics: Running, Character, Goal, Reaching Goals, Art Of Writing

I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.

Topics: Buddhism, Thinking, Wings

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

Topics: Hands, Long, Matter, Leaving A Legacy, Creative Person

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.

Topics: Love, Writing, Ideas

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

Topics: Cat, Writing, My Favorite

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

Topics: Teaching, Lessons, Never Forget

It's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid.

Topics: Stupid, Land, Mars

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

Topics: Passion, Writing, Careers

You've been put on the world to love the act of being alive.

Topics: Alive, World

Sunsets are loved because they vanish. Flowers are loved because they go. The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart. These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.

Topics: Goodbye, Dog, Morning, Old Dog, Muzzle

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while.

Topics: Needs, Bothered

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

Topics: Children, Littles, Muse

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.

Topics: Running, Sleep, Writing

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.

Topics: Ignorance, Writing, Way, Quails, Gunshots

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

Topics: Running, Character, Snow

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

Topics: Children, Science, Disrespectful

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth

Topics: Art

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

Topics: Book, Smell, Egypt, Old Books, Ancient Egypt

Surprise is where creativity comes in.

Topics: Creativity, Surprise

A book is a loaded gun.

Topics: Book, Gun, Loaded Gun

...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

Topics: Being Yourself, Fun, Mean, Gusto, Not Being Yourself

When I graduated from high school I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years.

Topics: Reading, School, College

The important thing is to be in love with something.

Topics: Important

We're all fools," said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.

Topics: Morning, Thinking, Yesterday

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

Topics: Men, World

The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Topics: Alive, Universe, Martian Chronicles

Without the library, you have no civilization.

Topics: Civilization, Library

The things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love should be things that you do.

Topics: Should

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Topics: Letting Go, Running, Writing, Bite Me

The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it.... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane.... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.

Topics: Race, People, Insane, Dealing With It, Damned Human Race

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