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• There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.
  • The Martian Chronicles (1950) "Usher II"

• I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite.
  • The Martian Chronicles (1950) "Usher II"

• In touch! There's a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices.
  • "The Murderer" (1953)

• I've done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done to me. I took the bottom out of her life.
  • "The Great Wide World Over There" (1953)

• I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?
  • "Why Cartoons Are Forever", Los Angeles Times (3 December 1989)

• "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."
  • Introduction to The Stories of Ray Bradbury

• Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.
  • Brown Daily Herald (24 March 1995)

• My job is to help you fall in love.
  • Speech at Brown University (1995)

• Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.
  • Speech at Brown University (1995)

• We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe.... If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal.
  • Speech to National School Board Association (1995)

• The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.
  • Speech at Eureka College (1997)

• 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.
  • "G. B. S. — Mark V", in I Sing the Body Electric: And Other Stories (1998)

• The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.
  • Foreword to A Passion for Books (1999) by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan

• If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.
  • Salon.com (29 August 2001)

• Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time— And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.
  • Salon.com (29 August 2001)

• Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid.
  • Salon Magazine (29 August 2001)

• 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.
  • As quoted in Ray Bradbury: The Uncensored Biography (2006) by Gene Beley, p. 284

• And what, you ask, does writing teach us?
  First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
  So 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.
  • Preface to Zen and the Art of Writing

• From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. 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.
  • Zen and the Art of Writing, page 120 of the mass market paperback edition

• People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.
  • Beyond 1984: The People Machines

• Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.
  • The Circus of Dr. Lao Introduction

• Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.
  • A Graveyard for Lunatics

• Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.
  • Ylla

• I believe the universe created us — we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious.
  • AARP Magazine (July-August 2008)

• A life's work should be based on love.
  • Barnes & Nobel Santa Monica Promenade Book Signing (2008)

Fahrenheit 451

These are a few samples from the novel, and quotes from later essays about it. for more quotes from the novel see Fahrenheit 451.

• You can't guarantee things like that! After 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. (Bradbury 86)

• With schools 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. (Bradbury 26)

• If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

• If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.

• Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?

• Montag, you're looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.

• 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.

Coda 1979

• There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

• Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

• For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.

• Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

Misattributed

• If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
  • Epigraph, in Fahrenheit 451 a translation of a statement by Juan Ramón Jiménez

• There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
  • Actually a statement by Joseph Brodsky, as quoted in The Balancing Act : Mastering the Competing Demands of Leadership (1996) by Kerry Patterson, p. 437