Quotes from Ray Bradbury

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.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

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 don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.

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 heading for shore.

Writing is survival. Not to write, for many of us, is to die. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

The terrible tyranny of the majority.

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

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

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

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

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

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.

Everything is generated through your own will power.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.