Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012)
American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer.
With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual," of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land.
Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back hoping and waiting until—bang!
All silence is.
All emptiness.
And now:
The dawn.
I believe in Darwin and God together.
The guy keeps writing about Jesus, but he doesn't consider himself a Christian … He says faith is necessary but that we should accept the fact that when it comes to God, none of us know anything.
Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.
As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook.
My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve.
If NASA's budgeters could be convinced that there are riches on Mars, we would explode overnight to stand on the rim of the Martian abyss.
There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.
The news is all rapes and murders we didn't commit, funerals we don't attend, AIDS we don't want to catch. All crammed into a quarter of a minute! But at least we still have a hand with which to switch channels or turn off altogether.
Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.
And from above a voice fused half in iron
Half in irony gives man a dreadful choice.
The role is his, it says, Man makes and loads his own strange dice,
They sum at his behest,
He dooms himself. He is his own sad jest.
Let go? Let be?
Why do you ask this gift from Me?
When, trussed and bound and nailed,
You sacrifice your life, your liberty
You hang yourself upon the tenterhook.
Pull free!
If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either.
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer.
Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine.
“I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.
The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.