We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
—Ray Bradbury
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Miracles
You’ve got to love libraries. You’ve got to love books. You’ve got to love poetry. You’ve got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Libraries
If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Enjoyment
I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true—hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Practice
I love writing, it’s the center of my life. If you don’t love what you do, you’d better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don’t have a reason for living.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Authors & Writing
You can make yourself happy or miserable – it’s the same amount of effort.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Happiness
Stuff your eyes with wonder … 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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Adventure, Wonder
I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Future, The Future
My stories run up and bite me in the leg—I respond by writing them down – everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Authors & Writing
We’re all fools…all the time. It’s just we’re a different kind each day. We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Growth
When I was a young man, I didn’t think about having a family. My wife and I were too poor to have babies. Then all of a sudden, one came along and scared the hell out of us because we had no money. Once the baby arrives, you make do somehow. You fall in love with the baby and life adjusts itself. You find you don’t need as much money as you thought. When that happens, you can ask the questions that should have come before the baby.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Parenting
Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: America
You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.
—Ray Bradbury
First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Fear
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t “try” to do things. You simply “must” do things.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Thought, Thinking
And now, these books. This. He touched PHYSIOGNOMONIE. The secrets of the individual’s character as found on his face. Were Jim and Will, then, featured all angelic, pure, half-innocent, peering up through the sidewalk at marching terror? Did the boys represent the ideal for your Woman, Man, or Child of Excellent Bearing, Color, Balance, and Summer Disposition?
Converserly…Charles Halloway turned a page…did the scurrying freaks, the Illustrated Marvel, bear the foreheads of the Irascible, the Cruel, the Covetous, the mouths of the Lewd and Untruthful? the teeth of the Crafty, the Unstable, the Audacious, the Vainglorious, and your Marvelous Beast?
No. The book slipped shut. If faces were judged, the freaks were no worse than many he’d been slipping from the liberty late nights in his long career.
There was only one thing sure.
Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension:
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
So vague yet so immense.
He did not want to live with it.
Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it for all the rest of his life.
At the window he looked out and thought Jim, Will, are you coming? will you get here?
Waiting, his flesh took paleness from his bones.
—Ray Bradbury
It is good to renew one’s wonder, said the philosopher.
Space travel has again made children of us all.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Space
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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Writing
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Books, Reading
Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall
—Ray Bradbury
We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Creativity
If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Dreams
If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go in business because we’d be cynical: It’s gonna go wrong. Or She’s going to hurt me. Or, I’ve had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore … Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Cause, Risk-taking, Sin, Love, Bravery, Jump, Friend, Friends, Time, Risk, Courage, Friendship, Win, Intelligence, Intellectuals, Business
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Authors & Writing
Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon. Not theories, however. Theories are invigorating and tonic. Give me an ounce of fact and I will produce you a ton of theory by tea this afternoon. That is, after all, my job.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Facts
Richard Bach with this book does two things. He gives meFlight. He makes me Young. For both I am deeply grateful.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Authors & Writing
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
—Ray Bradbury
Sometimes you’ve got to jump off cliffs and grow wings on the way down.
—Ray Bradbury
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Television
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
Ursula K. Le Guin Science-fiction writer
Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
Philip K. Dick American Novelist
Orson Scott Card American Author
William S. Burroughs American Novelist
Lois McMaster Bujold American Novelist
Stephen King American Novelist
John D. MacDonald American Novelist
Brian Aldiss English Novelist