Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.”

— Ray Bradbury

302. “How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.”

— Ray Bradbury

303. “I don’t have a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.”

— Ray Bradbury

304. “Fire the doubters out of your life.”

— Ray Bradbury

305. “A day without writing was a little death.”

— Ray Bradbury

306. “To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.”

— Ray Bradbury

307. “But no man’s a hero to himself.”

— Ray Bradbury

308. “And a last thought from Tom: O Mr. Moundshroud, will we EVER stop being afraid of nights and death? And the thought returned: When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.”

— Ray Bradbury

309. “When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life – that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don’t listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.”

— Ray Bradbury

310. “You should love literature. You should live in the library. Forget about films.”

— Ray Bradbury

311. “Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.”

— Ray Bradbury

312. “I believe in Darwin and God together.”

— Ray Bradbury

313. “Raw, gentle, and easy, it mizzled out of the high air, a special elixir, tasting of spells and stars and air, carrying a peppery dust in it, and moving like a rare light sherry on his tongue. Rain.”

— Ray Bradbury

314. “You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks.”

— Ray Bradbury

315. “They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful.”

— Ray Bradbury

316. “The entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can’t have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.”

— Ray Bradbury

317. “I hate a Roman named Status Quo.”

— Ray Bradbury

318. “Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it... Where did I find the courage to rebel, to change my life, live alone? I don’t want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was.”

— Ray Bradbury

319. “He had written a short story once called “The Pedestrian,” about a man who is incarcerated by the police after he is stopped simply for walking.”

— Ray Bradbury

320. “What would you do if you knew this was the last night of the world?”

— Ray Bradbury

321. “You don’t stay for nothing.”

— Ray Bradbury

322. “Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.”

— Ray Bradbury

323. “How many times can a man go down and still be alive?”

— Ray Bradbury

324. “But Clarisse’s favorite subject wasn’t herself. It was everyone else, and me. She was the first person in a good many years I’ve really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted.”

— Ray Bradbury

325. “He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out.”

— Ray Bradbury

326. “But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it’s up to you now to know with which ear you’ll listen.”

— Ray Bradbury

327. “The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.”

— Ray Bradbury

328. “More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.”

— Ray Bradbury

329. “Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.”

— Ray Bradbury

330. “When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, “There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,” the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.”

— Ray Bradbury

331. “You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides of a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.”

— Ray Bradbury

332. “How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?”

— Ray Bradbury

333. “You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of the swimming between the clouds, like the enemy disks, and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire; that was how the night felt.”

— Ray Bradbury

334. “Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly.”

— Ray Bradbury

335. “Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”

— Ray Bradbury

336. “I’m not anyone, I’m just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I’m something you can’t help.”

— Ray Bradbury

337. “People don’t talk about anything... No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”

— Ray Bradbury

338. “The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm.”

— Ray Bradbury

339. “War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns. But I don’t suppose that’s the kind of victory you boys mean for me to talk on.”

— Ray Bradbury

340. “I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t take the toys out of their hands, we’re fools.”

— Ray Bradbury

341. “The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.”

— Ray Bradbury

342. “I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.”

— Ray Bradbury

343. “Her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall, but it felt no rain; over which clouds might pass their moving shadows, but she felt no shadow.”

— Ray Bradbury

344. “Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page, from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the secondhand notions and time-worn philosophies.”

— Ray Bradbury

345. “This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are.”

— Ray Bradbury

346. “Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?”

— Ray Bradbury

347. “Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.”

— Ray Bradbury

348. “My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.”

— Ray Bradbury

349. “You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

— Ray Bradbury

350. “You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead.”

— Ray Bradbury