Ray Bradbury Quotes

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead it ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than made or paid for in factories.

You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

You know what Mars is? It’s like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago – don’t know if you ever had one – they called them kaleidoscopes, bits of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that’s Mars. Enjoy it. Don’t ask it to be nothing else but what it is.

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can’t sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

You don’t question Providence. If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.

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.

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

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.

What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?