Inspirational Quotes by Ray Bradbury (American Science-Fiction Writer)

Inspirational Quotations by Ray Bradbury (American Science-Fiction Writer)

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012,) fully Ray Douglas Bradbury, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, playwright, and poet. He is celebrated for his novels and original short stories that combine a poetic style, nostalgia for childhood and American small-town life, social criticism, and a consciousness of the perils of runaway technology.

Born in Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury lived from 1934 in Los Angeles, where he educated himself at the public libraries. A devoted fan of sensational fiction and comics, he began contributing to pulp magazines, graduating to literary magazines and short story anthologies. He was one of the first authors to blend the concepts of science fiction with a sophisticated prose style.

Bradbury’s best-known novel is Fahrenheit 451 (1953; film adaptation, 1966.) Written on a rented typewriter in just nine days in the basement of a library at the University of California at Los Angeles, it is a disconcerting portrayal of a future where society has proscribed literature. The title comes from the temperature at which paper burns without being exposed to flame.

Bradbury’s novels include The Illustrated Man (1951,) Dandelion Wine (1957,) Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962,) Death is a Lonely Business (1985,) A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990,) and Farewell Summer (2006.)

Bradbury is renowned in particular as a short-story writer; he created some of the best examples in the genre, among them ‘The Day It Rained Forever,’ ‘R is for Rocket,’ and those included in The Martian Chronicles (1950.) The Toynbee Convector (1988) was the last of his many collections of short stories.

Bradbury also wrote plays, poetry, children’s stories, screenplays, and volumes of essays, such as Journey to Far Metaphor (1994.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ray Bradbury

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

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

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

Oh, Little Blue Engine, cried the dolls and toys. “Will you pull us over the mountain? Our engine has broken down and the boys and girls on the other side won’t have any toys to play with or good food to eat, unless you help us. Please, please, let us, Little Blue Engine”. “I’m not very big,” said the Little Blue Engine. “They use me only for switching trains in the yard. I have never been over the mountains”. … Puff, puff, chug, chug, went the Little Blue Engine. “I think I can—I think I can—I think can—I think can—I think I can—I think can—I think can—I think I can—I think can—I think can”.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Think, Good

A good night’s sleep, or a ten-minute brawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Medicine

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.
—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

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

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

You can make yourself happy or miserable – it’s the same amount of effort.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Happiness

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

First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Fear

You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.
—Ray Bradbury

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

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

Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Writing

Without libraries what have we?. We have no past and no future.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Libraries

It doesn’t matter what you do…so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: God

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall
—Ray Bradbury

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

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

If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Enjoyment

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Writing

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

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.
—Ray Bradbury
Topics: Feelings

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: Wonder, Adventure

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
—Ray Bradbury

Sometimes you’ve got to jump off cliffs and grow wings on the way down.
—Ray Bradbury

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
—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