American author (1920-2012)
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
RAY BRADBURY
Zen in the Art of Writing
The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.
RAY BRADBURY
Dandelion Wine
The television, 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.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Ray Bradbury: Uncensored!
Mars is opening up. It's a frontier now, like in the old days on Earth, out West, and in Alaska. Men are pouring up here. There's a couple thousand black Irish mechanics and miners and day laborers in First Town who need saving, because there're too many wicked women came with them, and too much ten-century-old Martian wine.
RAY BRADBURY
The Illustrated Man
Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Emily the Strange: Piece of Mind
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.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.
RAY BRADBURY
"No News, or, What Killed the Dog?"
Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
Mars is like that uncleaned closet we have neglected for millenniums. Sin has collected there like bric-a-brac. Mars is twice Earth's age and has had double the number of Saturday nights, liquor baths, and eye-poppings at women as naked as white seals. When we open that closet door, things will fall on us.
RAY BRADBURY
The Illustrated Man
People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.
RAY BRADBURY
Beyond 1984: The People Machines
I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it's really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricochet that enables you to have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and superintellectual.
RAY BRADBURY
The Paris Review, spring 2010
Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.
RAY BRADBURY
introduction, The Circus of Dr. Lao
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.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
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.
RAY BRADBURY
Something Wicked This Way Comes
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.
RAY BRADBURY
Zen in the Art of Writing
The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Book Savvy
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.
RAY BRADBURY
Coda
The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Get Started in Writing a Novel