Quotes from Ray Bradbury

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

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.

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

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

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

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

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen.

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

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.

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.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.

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

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

Nobody 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.

I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, 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. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that, he said, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.