Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “You laugh when I haven’t been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to think what I’ve asked you.”

— Ray Bradbury

302. “The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It’s problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems.”

— Ray Bradbury

303. “So many people are. Afraid of firemen, I mean. But you’re just a man, after all...”

— Ray Bradbury

304. “I want your loves to be multiple. I don’t want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it.”

— Ray Bradbury

305. “When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It’s the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It’s the total field.”

— Ray Bradbury

306. “There is more than one way to burn a book.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

310. “I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.”

— Ray Bradbury

311. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

313. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

315. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.”

— Ray Bradbury

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

326. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” someone said.”

— Ray Bradbury

327. “The wind whistled, was cool: it was an early autumn evening, no longer a late summer one.”

— Ray Bradbury

328. “And we lived in a world that was evil. A world that was like a great black ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking two billion people with it, whether they wanted to go or not, to death, to fall over the edge of the earth and the sea into radioactive flame and madness.”

— Ray Bradbury

329. “Don’t let them take your crying, turn it upside down and use it for their own smile! I’ll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags.”

— Ray Bradbury

330. “You don’t stay for nothing.”

— Ray Bradbury

331. “Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.”

— Ray Bradbury

332. “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

343. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

349. “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

350. “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