Ray Bradbury Quotes

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
― Juan Ramón Jiménez, Invisible Reality

“Sunsets are loved because they vanish.

Flowers are loved because they go.

The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart.

These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.”
― Ray Bradbury, From the Dust Returned

“Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Without the library, you have no civilization.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!”
― Ray Bradbury

“And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You can't ever have my books.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near.”
― Philip José Farmer

“We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The thing that makes me happy is that I know that on Mars, two hundred years from now, my books are going to be read. They’ll be up on dead Mars with no atmosphere. And late at night, with a flashlight, some little boy is going to peek under the covers and read The Martian Chronicles on Mars.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Pasamos la vida entera aprendiendo a olvidar cosas que en realidad están dentro”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, behind his DM's screen, and watched his adolescence stream by. Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“[Fahrenheit 451] is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Do you ever read any of the books you burn?'
He laughed. 'That's against the law!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“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 them swimming between the clouds, like the enemy discs, 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, Fahrenheit 451

“You weren't there, you didn't see,' he said. ' There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“[...] But time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the four-wall televisor. Why? The televisor is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Lo que usted anda buscando está en el mundo, pero el único medio para que una persona corriente vea el noventa y nueve por ciento de ello está en un libro.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“No importa lo que hagas, en tanto que cambies algo al respecto a como era antes de tocarlo, convirtiéndolo en algo que sea como tú después de que separes de ello tus manos.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Tom Skelton put on his bones.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You can't cut all the phone lines and still be on speaking terms with the world.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“What was the dream, gone now, but so wonderous that it cracked his face and uncorked something resembling a chuckle beneath his ribs!?”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“People think--wrongly--that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t; or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it. Futures are huge things that come with many elements and a billion variables, and the human race has a habit of listening to predictions for what the future will bring and then doing something quite different.

What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present--taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It's cautionary.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Ideas—written ideas—are special. They are the way we transmit our stories
and our thoughts from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our
shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us
empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the
world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things.”
― Neil Gaiman