Ray Bradbury

“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.”

“And from above a voice fused half in iron Pull free!”

“You make to die You the assassin of yourself.”

“You are the jailer and the jailed, do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill.”

“Why have you been so blind? Confess! This is what you've been.”

“The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar; A moment terrible to hear.”

“Man warring on himself an old tale is; In the porchyards of the void?!”

“There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.”

“Trapped in the blood, athirst for air, Now weaving this, now weaving that in swoons…”

“Ten thousand times a million sons of sons move Their conversation shouts of "Fool!"”

“A single face turned upward toward all Time One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.”

“I am the dreamer and the doer And weep until I smile…”

“Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings, In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.”

“I didn’t write Fahrenheit 451 about us. I wrote it about Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler. …\xa0I may not even talk about book banning if I don’t feel like it. I don’t prepare anything ahead. I have a dozen subjects to talk about because I write plays and poetry and essays, short stories and novels and screenplays and teleplays and operas. I’ll get lost, and the audience will have a wonderful time. And I’ll get a standing ovation, and they’ll go home.”

“Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.”

“I’m working on a screenplay of Fahrenheit 451 that will star Mel Gibson. It will be better than the original because they left a lot of things out of the first film. …\xa0It works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can’t say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It’s thought control and freedom of speech control.”

“I’m a magician who writes about ideas. I’m not a science-fiction writer. People who call me that are wrong. Most of what I write is fantasy or magic realism or plays about my Mexican-American background.”

“I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

“In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.”

“The way to teach in this world is to pretend you're not teaching. Science fiction offers the chance to pretend to look the other way while teaching. Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.”

“The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.”

“We all love toys. I'm toy oriented. I write about toys. I've got a lot of toys. Hundreds of things. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative. … People are talking about the Internet as a creative tool for writers. I say, "B.S. Stay away from that. Stop talking to people around the world and get your work done."”

“Don't tell me how to write my novel. Don't tell me you've got a better ending for it. I have no time for that.”

“We should be back on the moon right now. And we should be going off to Mars immediately. … How come we're looking at our shoes instead of at the great nebula in Orion? Where did we mislay the moon and back off from Mars? The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads.”

“We could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves — that's a real religious activity. That's what space travel can be — relating ourselves to the universe. … NASA is to blame — the entire government is to blame — and the end of the Cold War really pulled the plug, draining any passion that remained.”

“If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

“I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.”

“When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life — that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.”

“I don't care what the science fiction trade technicians say, either. They are furious that I get away with murder. I use a scientific idea as a platform to leap into the air and never come back. This keeps them angry at me. They still begrudge my putting an atmosphere on Mars in The Martian Chronicles more than 40 years ago.”

“You should read in your own field only when you're young. When I was 8, 10, 12, 16, 25, I read science fiction. But then I went on to Alexander Pope and John Donne and Moliere to mix it up.”

“When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.”

“The news is all rapes and murders we didn't commit, funerals we don't attend, AIDS we don't want to catch. All crammed into a quarter of a minute! But at least we still have a hand with which to switch channels or turn off altogether. I tell my lecture audiences to never, ever watch local TV news.”

“Magazines today are almost all stupid and moronic to start with. And it makes me furious that I can't find any articles to read anymore. I used to enjoy Forbes and Fortune, but now the pages are completely cluttered with ads.”

“There is no reason to write pornography when your own sex life is good. Why waste time writing about it?”

“Most of the writers I know in any field, especially science fiction, grew up late. They're so interested in doing what they do and in their science, they don't think about other things.”

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

“When I was 16, I saw six people die horribly in an accident. I walked home holding on to walls and trees. It took me months to begin to function again. So I don't drive. But whether I drive or not is irrelevant. The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society — cars kill more than wars do. More than 50,000 people will die this year because of them and nobody seems to notice.”

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

“I feel like I own all the kids in the world because, since I've never grown up myself, all my books are automatically for children. … It's mutual delight and love made manifest. For one thing, kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.”

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

“On my seventieth birthday, when I reflected that so many of my friends were dead or dying, it hit me that it was high time I got more work done. Ever since that time, I have done the active, smart thing by increasing my productivity. I'm not on the rocks or shoals yet, but the last few years have been a devastation of illnesses and deaths of many good friends. [Star Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry was a loss that deeply grieved me.”

“If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.”

“Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."”

“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.”

“I don't believe in the anthropomorphic God. … I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.”

“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.”

“Libraries raised me. 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.”

“Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that.”

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

“If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet."”

“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.”

“New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.”

“If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

“I knew I was going into one of the arts: I was drawing, acting, and writing. -->”

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

“I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don’t publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don’t you have a novel?”

“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.”

“I just can’t imagine being in a world and not being fascinated with what ideas are doing to us.”

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

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

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do — and they don’t. They have prejudices.”

“We've got to dumb America up again.”

“The problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.”

“Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.”

“My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.”

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

“I can work anywhere.”

“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.”

“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.”

“As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn’t quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.”

“I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.”

“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.”

“I write all the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I’m going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me. When they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and trap them before they’re gone. That’s the whole secret: to do things that excite you.”

“The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.”

“Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that I’m not responsible for any of this. It’s from God. And I’m so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is “at play in the fields of the Lord.” It’s been wonderful fun and I’ll be damned where any of it came from. I’ve been fortunate. Very fortunate.”

“My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We're all god.”

“I don’t understand writers who have to work at it. I like to play. I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.”

“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.”

“I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing.”

“Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, 'Do this, do that,' but it's my demon who provokes me.”

“From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?”

“In that film Love Story, there’s a line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other.”

“We're all dreamers.”

“Nikos Kazantzakis says, “Live forever.” That’s his social obligation. The Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. All of Dickens says live life at the top of your energy.”

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

“Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.”

“I've been afraid of people playing their life away with too many toys.”

“When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn't exist. TV didn't exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.”

“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.”

“You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.”

“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.”

“There's no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.”

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

“If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.”

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

“After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.”

“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.”

“First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”

“I'm not a serious person, and I don't like serious people.”

“Touch a scientist and you touch a child.”

“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.”

“The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.”

“I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.”

“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 don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.”

“Everything is generated through your own will power.”

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

“The library, then, at seven-fifteen, seven-thirty, seven-forty-five of a Sunday night, cloistered with great drifts of silence and transfixed avalanche of books poised like the cuneiform stones of eternity on shelves, so high the unseen snows of time fell all year there.”

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

“I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.”

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . 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.”

“Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.”

“I don't need to be vindicated, and I don't want attention.”

“All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.”

“All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn't matter if you have a beautiful face or not.”

“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.”

“I don't control my writing - it controls me.”

“The Internet is a big distraction.”

“I got started as an actor when I was 12.”

“You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.”

“I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

“We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon.”

“You fail only if you stop writing.”

“When you're older you want to learn from other people.”

“You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.”

“We are anthill men upon an anthill world.”

“I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.”

“Libraries raised me.”

“When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.”

“I don't believe in colleges and universities.”

“My favorite writers have been those who've said things well.”

“Why go to a machine when you could go to a human being?”

“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.”

“I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?”

“When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.”

“You don't have to turn on the TV set. You don't have to work on the Internet. It's up to you.”

“We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.”

“You pay a certain penalty for going your own way. A lot of people think you're nuts, and you're not as popular with girls as you should be.”

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

“If you're embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn't include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.”

“Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'”

“Facts are not interesting to me.”

“I think we're doing a dreadful job of educating.”

“I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I took pictures of Myrna Loy and Joel McCrea in front of the studios. I loved Hollywood. I have 500 autographs and 500 photographs I took.”

“If I'd found out that Norman Mailer liked me. I'd have killed myself.”

“The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.”

“Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it.”

“If an idea isn't exciting, you shouldn't do it.”

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

“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.”

“My goal is to entertain myself and others.”

“'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen.”

“I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count.”

“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.”

“The important thing is to be in love with something.”

“I've only written one science-fiction book: 'Fahrenheit 451.' That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.”

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

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

“All of my writing is God-given.”

“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.”

“There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.”

“If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.”

“It's lack that gives us inspiration. It's not fullness.”

“Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores.”

“No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.”

“Burroughs is crap. Crap.”

“Electronic books are junk.”

“Most of my short stories are fantasy.”

“The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it.”

“If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.”

“I don't go around thinking I'm Ray Bradbury all the time.”

“The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.”

“I'm not a futurist.”

“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.”

“I have fun with ideas; I play with them.”

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

“I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.”

“When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.”

“I don't see myself as a philosopher. That's awfully boring.”

“In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.”

“I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money.”

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

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

“I felt a bit bookish, cut off from life.”

“Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.”

“The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors. They're judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c'mon, that's ridiculous. But they're doing it.”

“I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.”

“I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.”

“Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”

“My business is to prevent the future.”

“Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.”

“The sun burnt everyday. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and people anyway, without any help from him... One of them had to stop burning. The sun wouldn't, certainly. So it looked as if it had to be Montag and the people he had worked with until a few short hours ago.”

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

“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.”

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

“How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.”

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

“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.”

“Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.”

“He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that's how it turned out.”

“All flesh is one: what matter scores; 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. 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 "Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!"”

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...”

“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? 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Sunsets are loved because they vanish.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

“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.”

“Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.”

“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.”

“Books are alive, you see. They're not dead, they're alive.”

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

“Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.”

“The gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.”

“Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I'd like to spend more time with her.”

“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.”

“If you are going to describe the history of animation, you'd look at the early Disney work, then 'Bugs Bunny,' 'Road Runner' and other Warner Brothers theatrical productions. But when you got to 'Rocky and Bullwinkle,' you'd see they were unique: They assumed you had a brain in your head.”

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.”

“Look at the Chandra Levy case. It's become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors. They're judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c'mon, that's ridiculous. But they're doing it.”

“You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.”

“I don't do research. I never have.”

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

“With schools 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.”

“I find it amusing that I'm on the Internet now, because I've criticized it, but mainly I've criticized it on the basis of, 'What are you going to do with it?'”

“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.”

“All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.”

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

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

“I write screenplays in the middle of the night.”

“There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.”

“Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?”

“First 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.”

“Montag, you're looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the "guilty," but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.”

“You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do - and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“For, let's face it, 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. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.”

“The monster cried out at the tower. The foghorn blew. The monster roared again. The foghorn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth, and the sound that came from it was the sound of the foghorn itself.”

“Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”

“All floated upon an evening carrousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely haunted by television.”

“On the whole, the change had done Huxley a share of good. Death made him a handsomer man to deal with. You could talk to him now and he’d have to listen.”

“In touch! There’s a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices.”

““And what happened next?” “Silence happened next. God, it was beautiful.””

“The telephone rang like a spoiled brat.”

“Then I went in and shot the televisor, 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, but myself always going back, going back hoping and waiting until—bang!”

““I believe,” said the first lady, “that our souls are in our hands. For we do everything to the world with our hands. Sometimes I think we don’t use our hands half enough; it’s certain we don’t use our heads.””

“Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.”

“I’ve done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done to me. I took the bottom out of her life.”

“Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine. “I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.”

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

“THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …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…”

““Don’t these people ever get lonely?” “The minute you get a religion you stop thinking,” he said. “Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.””

“More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it’s too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing, a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and—irritable murder.”

““It will only take a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife. “I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.””

““Oh,” said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. “A man with wings.” That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him.”

“Anna said, “Must they have a reason?” “No, not if they’re insane, no,” said Juliet. “In that case no reasons are necessary.””

“He stood very straight and thought of nothing, or at least thought of thinking nothing.”

“All the sadder that Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past.”

“The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool.”

“Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that.”

“Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.”

“Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.”

“Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.”

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

“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.”

““No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.””

“Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another.”

“Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you’re twenty.”

“I’m not afraid. When you live as long as I’ve lived, you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I’d never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can’t say I’m greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don’t fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it.”

“I’ve alway known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It’s essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don’t know.”

“The sun did not rise, it overflowed.”

“Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple.”

“And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.”

“Next year’s going to be even bigger, days will be brighter, nights longer and darker, more people dying, more babies born, and me in the middle of it all.”

“You take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That's you [our son].”

“When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.”

“If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.”

“Will sensed a stir in Jim's house; Jim, too, with his fine dark antennae, must have felt the waters part high over town to let a Leviathan pass.”

“The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.”

“Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye.”

““War!” But why? Wasn’t life short enough without fighting and killing?”

“Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't die, that's what they say, can't die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmere who only whispers, and now they're coming and I'm nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be the one! If they live forever, why not me?”

“Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man’s attitude when he has power.”

““It will only take a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife. “I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.””

“Beware, Charlie, old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.”

““You remember winning, don’t you? A battle won, somewhere?” “No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”

“Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair Who never wished to die.”