Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012)
American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer.
Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair
Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear
And say out prayers that most need saying
For needful sinners who've forgotten praying;
And in every alcove and niche you spy
The living dead who envy the long since gone
Who never wished to die.
Computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative.
I don't care what the science fiction trade technicians say, either. They are furious that I get away with murder. I use a scientific idea as a platform to leap into the air and never come back. This keeps them angry at me. They still begrudge my putting an atmosphere on Mars in The Martian Chronicles more than 40 years ago.
The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads.
Yes, the problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.
“It will only take a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
“I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us – it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. [...] You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
I knew I was going into one of the arts: I was drawing, acting, and writing.
Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings,
In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.
When I wrote the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, the first draft was a hundred and fifty thousand words. So I went through and cut out fifty thousand. It’s important to get out of your own way. Clean the kindling away, the rubbish. Make it clear.
The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.
Joy is the grace we say to God.
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.
The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar;
A moment terrible to hear.
You are the jailer and the jailed,
You the impaler and the one that your own
Million-fleshed self in dreams by night
do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill.
I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.
“I believe,” said the first lady, “that our souls are in our hands. For we do everything to the world with our hands. Sometimes I think we don’t use our hands half enough; it’s certain we don’t use our heads.”
The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
I don't know what to do with dumb people, but we must try to educate them along with the sharp kids.