199 quotes
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.
Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
A single face turned upward toward all Time
One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.
Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)
Listen, you can't turn really bright people into robots. You can turn dumb people into robots, but that's true in every society and system.
Playboy interview (1996)
“What’s happening, Mr. Moundshroud? Where are we?”
Moundshroud struck a flinty finger into fire and held it up. “Why, bless me, boys. It’s the Dark Ages. The longest darkest night ever.”
The Halloween Tree (1972)
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.
I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true — hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.
Ray Bradbury: The Uncensored Biography (2006)
There is no reason to write pornography when your own sex life is good. Why waste time writing about it?
Playboy interview (1996)
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 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.
What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.
Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
In sum, my contact lenses had made me fifteen years old again. That is: festering, self-crucified bundle of doubt, horror, and absolute imperfection. The worst age in all one’s life had returned to haunt me with its pimpled, bumpy ghost.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
There they go, off to Venus, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.
Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time— And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.
Why have you been so blind?
Why have you never seen?
The slave and master in one skin
Is all your history, no more, no less,
Confess! This is what you've been.
Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)
Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.
Playboy interview (1996)
Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."
Playboy interview (1996)
I was able to do the job not because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
The Paris Review interview (2010)
We need space for reasons we have not as yet discovered, and I don't mean Tupperware.
Playboy interview (1996)
It’s big, it’s broad…
It’s broad, it’s bright…
It fills the sky of All Hallow’s Night…
The strangest sight you’ve ever seen.
The Monster Tree on Halloween.
The Halloween Tree (1972)