"The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers."
Read quote
5 likes
Quote collection
Ray Bradbury quotes (page 22 of 39)
762 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
Read quote
5 likes
"He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life."
Read quote
5 likes
"Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions."
Read quote
5 likes
"Once you let yourself begin to be grown-up, you face a world full of problems you can't solve. The politicians and specialists - adults, all - have a hard enough time trying to figure out where to look. It doesn't have to be that way. The greatest solutions in society are reached by corporate thinking, ruled by a motive to either make a profit or go out of business."
Read quote
5 likes
"Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work."
Read quote
5 likes
"I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing."
Read quote
5 likes
"It's rare you get an idea from a dream. I can't really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I've ever had a dream that held up. They're much too dislocated"
Read quote
5 likes
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
Read quote
5 likes
"I wake up in the morning and I lie in bed, and it's the time I call "the theater of morning." All these thoughts run around in my head, between my ears when I'm waking up. It's not a dream state, but it's not completely awake either. So all these metaphors run around and then I pick one and I get out of bed and I do it. I'm very lucky."
Read quote
5 likes
"I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form."
Read quote
5 likes
"I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal."
Read quote
5 likes
"You learn to live with your crazy enthusiasms which nobody else shares, and then you find a few other nuts like yourself, and they're your friends for a lifetime. That's what friends are, the people who share your crazy outlook and protect you from the world, because nobody else is going to give a damn what you're doing, so you need a few other people like yourself."
Read quote
5 likes
"I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy."
Read quote
5 likes
"Action is hope. There is no hope without action."
Read quote
5 likes
"You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!"
Read quote
4 likes
"In order to be creative, you don't have to be original."
Read quote
4 likes
"Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them."
Read quote
4 likes
"I don't understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway. Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?"
Read quote
4 likes
"Fire the doubters out of your life."
Read quote
4 likes