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.
Ray BradburyHe lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.
Ray BradburyA stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.
Ray BradburyNobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me, I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.
Ray BradburyI often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?
Ray BradburyAnything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
Ray BradburyAction is hope. At the end of each day, when you've done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I'll be damned, I did this today. It doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad-you did it. At the end of the week you'll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year.
Ray BradburyThat's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
Ray BradburyThe great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
Ray BradburyMy parents read the comics to me, and I fell in love with comic strips. I've collected them all of my life. I have a complete collection of all the "Buck Rogers" Sunday funnies and daily paper strips, I have all of "Prince Valiant" put away, all of "Tarzan," which appeared in the Sunday funnies in 1932 right on up through high school. So I've learned a lot from reading comics as a child.
Ray BradburyHow to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.
Ray BradburyThey stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.
Ray BradburyRemember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, 'I love you for what you do.'
Ray BradburyAny carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don't build a story; you allow it to explode.
Ray BradburyThis is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight, we have given the lie to gravity.We have reached for the stars.
Ray BradburyWe 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.
Ray BradburyThere must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
Ray BradburyGo out and make your own speeches. People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, "Hey, we got a crazy man in the community," and they'll begin talking to you.
Ray BradburyLove. 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.
Ray BradburyFirst grade is very cheap. It's the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don't do it right.
Ray BradburyMOTHER: Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping. Promise me, Jim. Wherever you go and come back, bring lots of kids. Let them run wild. Let me spoil them, some day. JIM: I'm never going to own anything that can hurt me.
Ray BradburyHe raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.
Ray BradburyWhat is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.
Ray BradburyI decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.
Ray BradburyDon’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.
Ray BradburyI love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living.
Ray BradburyI'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.
Ray BradburyThere is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
Ray Bradbury