199 quotes
“War!”
The thought stood in Sim’s brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.
But why? Wasn’t life short enough without fighting and killing?
R Is for Rocket (1962)
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.
Foreword to A Passion for Books (1999)
We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
Preface to Zen in the Art of Writing (1990)
A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;
The laughter sets him free.
A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.
The Fool is me!
Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)
The great religions are all metaphor.
The Paris Review interview (2010)
It's the work that identifies you.
Playboy interview (1996)
They both want to control you.
Playboy interview (1996)
The monster cried out at the tower. The foghorn blew. The monster roared again. The foghorn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth, and the sound that came from it was the sound of the foghorn itself.
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
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.
Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Don't tell me how to write my novel. Don't tell me you've got a better ending for it. I have no time for that.
Playboy interview (1996)
She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory—you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he’s all out of kilter.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
I’m glad you’re back in my life.
The Paris Review interview (2010)
I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing.
The Paris Review interview (2010)
I believe in Darwin and God together. It's all one. It's all mysterious. Look at the universe. It's been here forever. It's totally impossible.
Playboy interview (1996)
I don’t understand writers who have to work at it. I like to play. I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.
The Paris Review interview (2010)
“No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”
Dandelion Wine (1957)
I’m not afraid. When you live as long as I’ve lived, you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I’d never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can’t say I’m greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don’t fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
Misattributed
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Misattributed