Quotes from Ray Bradbury

All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

It was not burning, it was warming.

All my stories are cinematic. The Illustrated Man over at Warner Brothers a couple of years ago (1969) didn't work because they didn't read the short stories. I may be the most cinematic novelist in the country today. All of my short stories can be shot right off the page. Each paragraph is a shot.

To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.' 

Esas almas infelices que pensan que a imaxinación é prexudicial para a mente.

You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things couldn't really be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match!

But what father ever really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child?

Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you are 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.

Uscì quindi dalla casa del fuoco e si diresse per la strada notturna - era mezzanotte - verso la ferrovia sotterranea, dove il silenzioso convoglio ad aria compressa, scivolando come un'ombra dentro il suo budello bene oleato nelle viscere della terra, lo rigurgitò con uno sbuffo possente d'aria calda, sulla scala mobile dal pavimento color crema, che saliva verso la superficie, nella zona suburbana.

Father had to choose between finishing a story or playing with the girls. I chose to play, of course, which endangered the family income. An office had to be found. We couldn't afford one.

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 audiences would know.

emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing the machines rather than how to run the machines.

This wasn't the work of a cheap carnival tattoo man with three colors and whiskey on his breath. This was the accomplishment of a living genius, vibrant, clear, and beautiful.

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.

Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.

I was able, obviously, to answer all of the above. I named the sickness: my tearing up the strips. I found the cure: go back to collecting, no matter what. I did. And was made well.

One time, as a child, in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon. . .

And he was gesturing up through the trees above to show them how it was woven across the sky or how the sky was woven into the trees, he wasn't sure which. But there it was, he smiled, and the weaving went on, green and blue, if you watched and saw the forest shift its humming loom.

going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapours for supper.

And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman's Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills.

you cannot love someone unless you put up with him

I know, I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. Now, pick up your feet

Eminent, eminent people, one and all, members of the Society for the Prevention of Fantasy, advocators of the banishment of Halloween and Guy Fawkes, killers of bats, burners of books, bearers of torches; good clean citizens, every one, who had waited until the rough men had come up and buried the Martians and cleansed the cities and built the towns and repaired the highways and made everything safe.