Quotes from Ray Bradbury

Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the shared deep.

But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going.

You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. 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. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living.

Writing is not a serious business. It's a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it. Ignore the authors who say 'Oh, my God, what word? Oh, Jesus Christ…', you know. Now, to hell with that. It's not work. If it's work, stop and do something else.

They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools.

Business or profession?' 'I guess you'd call me a writer.' No profession,' said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies.

It doesn't matter if being so alive kills a man; it's better to have the quick fever every time.

You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of the swimming between the clouds, like the enemy disks, and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire; that was how the night felt.

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. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

Hay solo dos cosas con las que uno se puede acostar: Una persona y un libro

She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, Does it really belong to me? Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.

You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it.

Who said childhood was the best time of life? When in reality it was the most terrible, the most merciless era, the barbaric time when there were no police to protect you, only parents preoccupied with themselves and their taller world.

You don't stay for nothing.

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.

Far away in the cool dim empty rooms of the big old house, a silver bell tinkled and faded.

The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.

Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights?

She was too wonderful a character to be allowed to die and I realize now that I should have allowed her to appear at hte end of my book. [Ray writes about the character Clarisse]

This was all he wanted now. Some sign that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time needed to think all the things that must be thought.

Cerrando los ojos, volviendo la cabeza, escuchando. Oh que viento solitario. México es un país raro. Todo selvas y desiertos y extensiones solitarias y aquí y allí un pueblo pequeño como éste, con unaa pocas luces encendidas que puedes apagar con un castañeo de los dedos.