Ray Bradbury

"The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes."

"Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off."

"Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people."

"My first decision about a career was at eleven, to be a and travel the world with my . My second decision was at twelve when I got a toy typewriter for Christmas. And I decided to become a . And between the decision and the reality lay eight years of junior high school, high school, and selling newspapers on a street corner in Los Angeles, while I wrote three million words."

"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…"

"Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers."

"All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn."

"YOUR INFLUENCE ON US ALL, FROM 1939 ON, CANNOT BE MEASURED. I CAN ONLY SAY I REMEMBER, WARMLY, YOUR MANY KINDNESSES TO ME WHEN I WAS 19–20–21 YEARS OLD. THAT YOUNG MAN BASKED IN YOUR LIGHT AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE GRATEFUL FOR THE HELP YOU OFFERED WHEN I WAS SO POOR & NEEDFUL!"

"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!""

"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

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

"From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."

"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."

"Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day."

"Oh God, without them [libraries], what have we? We have no past and we have no future."

"The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us – it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. … You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

"I've always written at the top of my lungs and from some secret motives within. I have followed the advice of my good friend Federico Fellini who, when asked about his work, said, "Don't tell me what I'm doing, I don't want to know.""

"Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down."

"My job is to help you fall in love."

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

"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."

"The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive."

"We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts."

"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."

"At the end of June in 1939 I took a bus east to New York to attend the first World Science Fiction convention. On the bus with me I took the June of Astounding Science-Fiction in which the short story by A. E. van Vogt appeared. It was an astonishing encounter. In that same issue with him were C. L. Moore and Ross Rocklynne, a fantastic issue to take with me on that long journey, for I was still a poor unpublished writer selling newspapers on a street corner for ten dollars a week and hoping, someday, to be an established writer myself, but that was still two years off. On the way I drank in the words of A.E. Van Vogt and was stunned by what I saw there. He became a deep influence for the next year. As it turned out, I didn't become A.E. Van Vogt, no one else could, and when I finally met him was pleased to see that the man was as pleasant to be with as were his stories. I knew him over a long period of years and he was a kind and wonderful gentleman, a real asset to the Science Fantasy Society in L.A., where there are a lot of strange people. A.E. Van Vogt was not strange, he was kind. He gave me advice and helped me along the road to becoming what I wanted to become."

"If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were."

"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."

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

"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."

"I believe the universe created us — we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious."

"A life's work should be based on love."

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

"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."

"Joy is the grace we say to God."

"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."

"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."

"If you're reluctant to weep, you won't live a full and complete life."

"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."

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

"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."

"Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young."

"We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose."

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

"They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; 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."

"I’m being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite."

"Ignorance is fatal."

"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."