Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012)
American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer.
But at least I don't suffer from self-deluding identity problem like, say, Carl Sagan does.
I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.
We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.
Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
When a bright Sony inventor read about my seashell radios in that novel, he invented the Walkman. That was one good thing to emerge from that book - the banishment of most picnic-ruining ghetto blasters. But I had no idea I was doing it.
I don't think I'm Ray Bradbury. That's a big distinction. It doesn't matter who you are. You mustn't go around saying who you are, or else you get captured by the mask of false identity. It's the work that identifies you.
Whereas back then I wrote about the tyranny of the majority, today I'd combine that with the tyranny of the minorities. These days, you have to be careful of both.
There is no reason to write pornography when your own sex life is good. Why waste time writing about it?
Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man’s attitude when he has power.
My stories run up and bite me in the leg — I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
From reading so much poetry every day of my life. My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well.
Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember.
We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.
THE OCTOBER COUNTRY … that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coalbins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…
Whether you're a majority or minority, bug off! To hell with anybody who wants to tell me what to write. Their society breaks down into subsections of minorities who then, in effect, burn books by banning them.
The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.
Montag, you're looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the "guilty," but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.
The telephone rang like a spoiled brat.