"My prison, almost as far as I could see, a gray friendless area of space and time, and I resolved that as man had dominated the world of the sun, so I would dominate my world."

"How many lives has been lost on the cutting edge of discovery?"

"I'm at war with the French, as well as the Scottish. Have I forgotten anyone? The Spaniards, am I at war with them?"

"[about being trapped in medieval France] There's one thing worse than dying here and that's living here."

"[to his father] Last time you cut off your beard, I think you sold the house, and we moved to Kentucky for a year."

"The way I see it, we've got what... we've got 650 years of knowledge on these guys. If we put our heads together, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to get out of here and home in twenty minutes."

"I wanted, at the time, to have the story structure follow the book, in which you would go to flashbacks, but they didn't want to do that, and accordingly, I think the first part of the film is the dullest. I tried to write my novel that way originally, interestingly enough, and it didn't work at all. I didn't think it had any interest, so I had to jump right into the main body of the story, and then tell the back story through flashbacks, which is the way I think the film should have been done, but nobody did films that way in those days."

"Billy Curtis — Midget"

"Paul Langton — Charlie Carey"

"April Kent — Clarice"

"Randy Stuart — Louise Carey"

"Grant Williams — Scott Carey"

"Almost beyond the imagination... A strange adventure into the unknown! [UK theatrical]"

"Moment by moment the terror mounts!"

"Hour by hour he gets smaller and smaller!"

"The Most Incredible Story Ever!"

"A fascinating adventure into the unknown!"

"Victim of weird mist ! Day by day he shrinks! Science is baffled! Cat becomes monster! Terror at every turn! Deadly attacks! Lost in a flood's fury!"

"I was continuing to shrink, to become... what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close — the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends in man's conception, not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!"

"A strange calm possessed me. I thought more clearly than I had ever thought before — as if my mind were bathed in a brilliant light. I recognized that part of my illness was rooted in hunger, and I remembered the food on the shelf, the cake threaded with spider web. I no longer felt hatred for the spider. Like myself it struggled blindly for the means to live."

"Here it is: money to burn!"

"Hayden Rorke — Dr. Emery Bronson"

"Alden Chase — Dr. George Frye"

"John Hoyt — Sydney Stanton"

"Barbara Rush — Joyce Hendron"

"Larry Keating — Dr. Cole Hendron"

"Richard Derr — David Randall"

"Planets destroy Earth!"

"Romance! Thrills! Adventure!"

"He'll be home the day after tomorrow."

"It's dog eat dog – the law of the jungle!"

"[Breathing in] Best air I ever tasted."

"[First lines] [Spoken over a shot of outer space] Needles in a heavenly haystack. There are more stars in the heavens than there are human beings on Earth. Through telescopes men of science constantly search the infinitesimal corners of our solar system seeking new discoveries, hoping to better understand the laws of the Universe. Observatories dedicated to the study of astronomy are set in high and remote places, but there is none more remote than Mt. Kenna Observatory in this part of South Africa."

"Julie Christie – Clarisse/ Linda Montag"

"Alex Scott – Book Person: “The Life of Henry Brulard”"

"Bee Duffell – Book Woman"

"Jeremy Spenser – Man with the Apple"

"Anton Diffring – Fabian/ Headmaster"

"Cyril Cusack – The Captain"

"Oskar Werner – Guy Montag"

"What if you had no right to read?"

"A flame with the excitement and emotions of tomorrow!"

"The movie is so listless we have what we should never have in a gimmicky thriller: time to notice inconsistencies. People know how to read; why are they taught? Why are the book people hiding libraries in town instead of smuggling them to the woods? (Do they have a secret lending library?) Why are we shown the hero revealing his guilt to his co-workers (in scenes like his inability to go up the fire-pole) if it doesn't lead to any consequences? Why are we shown an antagonism between Werner and another fireman (Anton Diffring) which never develops into anything functional in the structure? Why is it so easy to escape to the woods? Couldn't Truffaut or anyone think up a better contrivance to bring the book girl back than the need to retrieve an incriminating list of names (of people who memorize books!)? The actions in this movie don't flow from the theme; O.K. we can accept that if, at least, they're ingenious. But they're not. Still, all the holes in the plot would just make it seem lacy and airy if the movie had rhythm, if it moved purposefully, if the moods surprised us or intrigued us. Why doesn’t it?"

"Yet even at the science-fiction horror-story level, the movie fails—partly, I think, because Truffaut is too much of an artist to exploit the vulgar possibilities in the material. He doesn't give us pace and suspense and pious sentiments followed by noisy climaxes; he is too tasteful to do what a hack director might have done. Can't you visualize the scene when the hero, Oskar Werner, reads his first book, David Copperfield as it might have been done at Warner's or MGM in the thirties, how his face would light up and change with the exaltation of the experience the triumph of man's liberation from darkness? Well, ludicrous as it would have been, it might have been better than what Truffaut does with it—which is nothing. Truffaut is so cautious not to be obvious, the scene isn't dramatized at all, and so we're left to figure out for ourselves that Werner must have enjoyed the reading experience because he goes on with it. Soon we're left to figure out for ourselves why he has gotten so addicted to books that he's willing to kill for them. It would, no doubt, be obvious to have an adulterous romance between Werner and the girl who goads him to read, but Truffaut doesn't supply any relationship to help define their characters, And if he feels that too much characterization is wrong for the genre, couldn't he at least give them actions that would define their roles in the story? Yes, it would be too much of a familiar movie cliché to have Julie Christie play the two roles of the wife and the book girl in sharply contrasting styles, but he makes nothing out of her being so much the same in both roles. And it hardly helps us to see what books mean in human life if her range of expressiveness is as narrow for the book girl as for the bookless pill-head wife. The book girl's language is just as drab and she doesn’t show any of the curiosity or imagination that might indicate that books had done something for her. Couldn't she have something alive and responsive about her that would help us to understand why Werner reacts to her suggestion that he read a book? And shouldn't he have something that sets him apart, that makes him a candidate for heresy? The movie certainly needs somebody in it who has some life. And if the reply to this is that in this movie the books represent the life that is not in the people, then surely it is even more necessary to see that the book people have life. And shouldn't they speak differently from the others, shouldn't they take more pleasure in language? Couldn't they give themselves away by the words they use—the love of the richness of words? It's all very well for the director not to want to be obvious, but then he’d better be subtle. He can’t just abdicate as if he thought it would be too vulgar to push things one way or another."

"Most books don’t make people think, and print is not in itself a danger to totalitarianism. That is a crotchety little librarian's view of books. Print is as neutral as the television screen. And so we're back from the primitive appeal of the gimmick to the Orwell vision of censorship and terror. And yet such is the power of the gimmick that I swear I heard people in the theatre murmur at the astuteness of that nonsensical explanation for book-burning. You'd think they'd never read a book, they're so willing to treat books as magical objects. And that is, of course, how the movie treats them: the gimmick turns books—any books—into totems, and this is part of the gimmick's appeal to educated audiences, and it's probably a stronger appeal than a more rational treatment of the dangers of censorship could make."