Quotes from Ray Bradbury

Anything that's strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense.

Ideas—written ideas—are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our thoughts from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Thus with the wisest of you all; you are ever unfixed.

men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells.

She didn't want to know -how- a thing was done, but -why-. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead.

Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

He walked toward the corner, thinking little at all about nothing in particular.

There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever.

We all do what we do.

I'm antisocial,they say. I don't mix. It's so strange.I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this. She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. Or taking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice.

It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not.

Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.

Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces. And now they were tampering with something more intangible--the memory; they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year.

Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.

Going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for dinner.

Look for the little loves. Find and shape the little bitternesses.

Stand by for the lovely concussion.

Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating.

A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am. But it burns with a high flame.

I do not use my intellect to write my stories and books; I have a gut reaction to the things that my subconscious gives me.

Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audience would know.

Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered? The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.

Ten minutes after death a man's a speck of black dust. Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.