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Every Morning I Jump Out Of Bed And Step On A Landmine. The Landmine Is Me. After The Explosion, I Spent The Rest Of The Day Putting The Pieces Together.

-Ray Bradbury

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Every Morning I Jump

Ray Bradbury

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Every Morning I Jump Out Of Bed And Step On A Landmine. The Landmine Is Me. After The Explosion, I Spent The Rest Of The Day Putting The Pieces Together.

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If You Don't Like What You're Doing, Then Don't Do It.

Science-fiction Balances You On The Cliff. Fantasy Shoves You Off.

...i Mean, You Don't Just Love People, You Must Love Them With Exclamation Points.

Exclamation Points

A Life's Work Should Be Based On Love.

I Believe In Having Fun First, And Along The Way, If You Teach People, If You Influence People, Well And Good.

Everything Is Generated Through Your Own Will Power.

Oh God, The Terrible Tyranny Of The Majority. We All Have Our Harps To Play. And It's Up To You To Know With Which Ear You'll Listen.

Tyranny Of The Majority

I Don't Believe In Government. I Hate Politics. I'm Against It. And I Hope That Sometime This Fall, We Can Destroy Part Of Our Government, And Next Year Destroy Even More Of It. The Less Government, The Happier I Will Be.

Where Would You Like To Go, What Would You Really Like To Do With Your Life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write A Book. Smoke Too Many Cigarettes. Fall Off A Cliff But Get Caught In A Tree Halfway Down. Get Shot At A Few Times In A Dark Alley On A Morrocan Midnight. Love A Beautiful Woman.

Writing Is Not A Serious Business. It’s A Joy And A Celebration. You Should Be Having Fun With It.

A Stranger Is Shot In The Street, You Hardly Move To Help. But If, Half An Hour Before, You Spent Just Ten Minutes With The Fellow And Knew A Little About Him And His Family, You Might Just Jump In Front Of His Killer And Try To Stop It. Really Knowing Is Good. Not Knowing, Or Refusing To Know Is Bad, Or Amoral, At Least. You Can’t Act If You Don’t Know.

My Characters Talk To One Another, And When It Reaches A Certain Pitch Of Excitement I Jump Out Of Bed And Run And Trap Them Before They Are Gone.

I Don't Believe In Being Serious About Anything. I Think Life Is Too Serious To Be Taken Seriously.

And When He Died, I Suddenly Realized I Wasn't Crying For Him At All, But For The Things He Did. I Cried Because He Would Never Do Them Again.

Remember, The Firemen Are Rarely Necessary. The Public Itself Stopped Reading Of Its Own Accord.

If You Enjoy Living, It Is Not Difficult To Keep The Sense Of Wonder.

Positive Thinking

Poverty Made A Sound Like A Wet Cough In The Shadows Of The Room.

They Stood There, King Of The Hill, Top Of The Heap, Ruler Of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs And Presidents, Trying To Understand What It Meant To Own A World And How Big A World Really Was.

Do You Understand Now Why Books Are Hated And Feared? Because They Reveal The Pores On The Face Of Life. The Comfortable People Want Only The Faces Of The Full Moon, Wax, Faces Without Pores, Hairless, Expressionless.

Old Men Only Lie In Wait For People To Ask Them To Talk. Then They Rattle On Like A Rusty Elevator Wheezing Up A Shaft.

There Was Her Face, Like A Summer Peach, Beautiful And Warm, And The Light Of The Candles Reflected In Her Dark Eyes. [he] Held His Breath. The Entire World Waited And Held Its Breath.

I'm Inclined To Believe You Need The Psychiatrist.

The Purpose Of Fiction Is Not To Nail You To The Ground As Facts Do, But To Take You To The Edge Of The Cliff And Kick You Off So You Build Your Wings On The Way Down.

I Don't Try To Describe The Future. I Try To Prevent It.

Today We Haved Touched Mars. There Is Life On Mars, And It Us Us-extensions Of Our Eyes In All Directions, Extensions Of Our Mind, Extensions Of Our Heart And Soul Have Touched Mars Today. That's The Message To Look For There: We Are On Mars. We Are The Martians!

Mars Is Empty Now. Five Hundred Years From Now, It'll Be Full Of People.

You Ask Why To A Lot Of Things And You Wind Up Very Unhappy Indeed, If You Keep At It. The Poor Girl's Better Off Dead

Better Off Dead

The Beginning Of Wisdom, As They Say. When You're Seventeen You Know Everything. When You're Twenty-seven If You Still Know Everything You're Still Seventeen.

You're Insane!" "i Won't Argue That Point.

As A Result Of Reading Science Fiction When I Was Eight, I Grew Up With An Interest In Music, Architecture, City Planning, Transportation, Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics On Any Level, Art...it's Just Total! It's A Complete Commitment To The Whole Human Race On All The Earth. That's What Science Fiction Is About.

You Can Write A Short Story In Two Hours. Two Hours A Day, You Have A Novel In A Year

God, How We Get Our Fingers In Each Other's Clay. That's Friendship, Each Playing The Potter To See What Shapes We Can Make Of Each Other.

From This Outer Edge Of His Life, Looking Back, There Was Only One Remorse, And That Was Only That He Wished To Go On Living. Did All Dying People Feel This Way, As If They Had Never Lived? Did Life Seem That Short, Indeed, Over And Done Before You Took A Breath? Did It Seem This Abrupt And Impossible To Everyone, Or Only To Himself, Here, Now, With A Few Hours Left To Him For Thought And Deliberation?

Americans Are Far More Remarkable Than We Give Ourselves Credit For. We've Been So Busy Damning Ourselves For Years. We've Done It All, And Yet We Don't Take Credit For It.

I Define Science Fiction As The Art Of The Possible. Fantasy Is The Art Of The Impossible. Science Fiction, Again, Is The History Of Ideas, And They're Always Ideas That Work Themselves Out And Become Real And Happen In The World. And Fantasy Comes Along And Says, 'we're Going To Break All The Laws Of Physics.' ... Most People Don't Realize It, But The Series Of Films Which Have Made More Money Than Any Other Series Of Films In The History Of The Universe Is The James Bond Series. They're All Science Fiction, Too - Romantic, Adventurous, Frivolous, Fantastic Science Fiction!

Action Is Hope. There Is No Hope Without Action.

I've Written About 2,000 Short Stories; I've Only Published 300 And I Feel I'm Still Learning. Any Man Who Keeps Working Is Not A Failure. He May Not Be A Great Writer, But If He Applies The Old Fashioned Virtues Of Hard, Constant Labor, He'll Eventually Make Some Kind Of Career For Himself As A Writer. Ray Bradbury, 1967 Interview (doing The Math - That Means For Every Story He Sold, He Wrote Six "un-publishable" Ones. Keep Typing!)

We Should Go To The Moon And Prepare A Base To Fire A Rocket Off To Mars And Then Go To Mars And Colonize Mars. Then When We Do That, We Will Live Forever.

Last Night I Thought About All The Kerosene I've Used In The Past Ten Years. And I Thought About Books. And For The First Time I Realized That A Man Was Behind Each One Of The Books. A Man Had To Think Them Up. A Man Had To Take A Long Time To Put Them Down On Paper. And I'd Never Even Thought That Thought Before...it Took Some Man A Lifetime Maybe To Put Some Of His Thoughts Down, Looking Around At The World And Life, And Then I Come Along In Two Minutes And Boom! It's All Over.

You Fail Only If You Stop Writing.

Inspiration To Write

Plot Is No More Than Footprints Left In The Snow After Your Characters Have Run By On Their Way To Incredible Destinations.

We Have Everything We Need To Be Happy But We Aren't Happy. Something Is Missing... It Is Not Books You Need, It's Some Of The Things That Are In Books. The Magic Is Only In What Books Say, How They Stitched The Patches Of The Universe Together Into One Garment For Us.

All Isn't Well With The World.

I Am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons Is Marcus. I Want You To Meet Jonathan Swift, The Author Of That Evil Political Book, Gulliver's Travels! And This Other Fellow Is Charles Darwin, And-this One Is Schopenhauer, And This One Is Einstein, And This One Here At My Elbow Is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, A Very Kind Philosopher Indeed. Here We All Are, Montag. Aristophanes And Mahatma Gandhi And Gautama Buddha And Confucius And Thomas Love Peacock And Thomas Jefferson And Mr. Lincoln, If You Please. We Are Also Matthew, Mark, Luke, And John.

When A Man Talks From His Heart, In His Moment Of Truth, He Speaks Poetry.

A Library Is All The University You Will Ever Need.

Poetry Expands The Senses And Keeps Them In Prime Condition. It Keeps You Aware Of Your Nose, Your Eye, Your Ear, Your Tongue, Your Hand.

I Am Not A Science Fiction Writer. I Am A Fantasy Writer. But The Label Got Put On Me And Stuck.

The World Doesn't Give A Damn About You Unless You Do Something. Those Are The Rules; I Didn't Make Them. If You Are Lazy, If You Don't Get The Work That You Love Done, The World Won't Care If You Die Tomorrow And Go Into The Grave And Are Gone And Forgotten Forever.

The Jungle Looked Back At Them With A Vastness, A Breathing Moss-and-leaf Silence, With A Billion Diamond And Emerald Insect Eyes.

You're Not Like The Others. I've Seen A Few; I Know. When I Talk, You Look At Me. When I Said Something About The Moon, You Looked At The Moon.

If I Was Ever A Rare Fine Summer Person, That's Long Ago. Most Of Us Are Half-and-half. The August Noon In Us Works To Stave Off The November Chills. We Survive By What Little Fourth Of July Wits We've Stashed Away. But There Are Times When We're All Autumn People.

It's Important To Read A Book, But Also To Hold The Book, To Smell The Book... It's Perfume, It's Incense, It's The Dust Of Egypt.

The Only Science Fiction I Have Written Is Fahrenheit 451. It's The Art Of The Possible. Science Fiction Is The Art Of The Possible. It Could Happen. It Has Happened.

Thank God For That. You Can Shut Them, Say, 'hold On A Moment.' You Play God To It. But Who Has Ever Torn Himself From The Claw That Encloses You When You Drop A Seed In A Tv Parlour? It Grows You Any Shape It Wishes! It Is An Environment As Real As The World. It Becomes And Is The Truth. Books Can Be Beaten Down With Reason. But With All My Knowledge And Scepticism, I Have Never Been Able To Argue With A One-hundred-piece Symphony Orchestra, Full Colour, Three Dimensions, And I Being In And Part Of Those Incredible Parlours.

For It Is A Mad World And It Will Get Madder If We Allow The Minorities, Be They Dwarf Or Giant, Orangutan Or Dolphin, Nuclear-head Or Water-conversationalist, Pro-computerologist Or Neo-luddite, Simpleton Or Sage, To Interfere With Aesthetics. The Real World Is The Playing Ground For Each And Every Group, To Make Or Unmake Laws. But The Tip Of The Nose Of My Book Or Stories Or Poems Is Where Their Rights End And My Territorial Imperatives Begin, Run And Rule.

Dad," Said Will, His Voice Very Faint. "are You A Good Person?" "to You And Your Mother, Yes, I Try. But No Man's A Hero To Himself. I've Lived With Me A Lifetime, Will. I Know Everything Worth Knowing About Myself-" "and, Adding It All Up...?" "the Sum? As They Come And Go, And I Mostly Sit Very Still And Tight, Yes, I'm All Right.

So In Sum, What Are We? We Are The Creatures That Know And Know Too Much. That Leaves Us With Such A Burden Again We Have A Choice, To Laugh Or Cry. No Other Animal Does Either. We Do, Depending On The Season And The Need.

A Reason I Became A Writer Was To Escape The Hopelessness And Despair Of The Real World And Enter The World Of Hope I Could Create With My Imagination.

Why All This Insistence On The Senses? Because In Order To Convince Your Reader That He Is There, You Must Assault Each Of His Senses, In Turn, With Color, Sound, Taste, And Texture. If Your Reader Feels The Sun On His Flesh, The Wind Fluttering His Shirt Sleeves, Half Your Fight Is Won. The Most Improbable Tales Can Be Made Believable, If Your Reader, Through His Senses, Feels Certain That He Stands At The Middle Of Events. He Cannot Refuse, Then, To Participate. The Logic Of Events Always Gives Way To The Logic Of The Senses.

So It Was The Hand That Started It All . . . His Hands Had Been Infected, And Soon It Would Be His Arms . . . His Hands Were Ravenous.

A Book Has Got Smell. A New Book Smells Great. An Old Book Smells Even Better. An Old Book Smells Like Ancient Egypt.

Each Person Was Himself One Alone. One Oneness, A Unit In A Society, But Always Afraid, Always Alone. If I Should Scream, If I Should Call For Help, Would Anyone Hear Would It Even Matter?

Why Live? Life Was Its Own Answer. Life Was The Propagation Of More Life And The Living Of As Good A Life As Possible.

Martian Chronicles

If You Write A Hundred Short Stories And They're All Bad, That Doesn't Mean You've Failed. You Fail Only If You Stop Writing.

It Is Good To Renew One's Wonder, Said The Philosopher. Space Travel Has Again Made Children Of Us All.

Treasure This Day And Treasure Yourself, Truly, Neither Will Ever Happen Again.

Libraries Are The Center Of Our Lives. There's No Use Going To A University If You Don't Live At The Library.

Those Who Don't Build Must Burn.

Fahrenheit 451 Book

The First Thing You Learn In Life Is You're A Fool. The Last Thing You Learn In Life Is You're The Same Fool.

I Got A Statistic For You Right Now. Grab Your Pencil, Doug. There Are Five Billion Trees In The World. I Looked It Up. Under Every Tree Is A Shadow, Right? So, Then, What Makes Night? I'll Tell You: Shadows Crawling Out From Under Five Billion Trees! Think Of It! Shadows Running Around In The Air, Muddying The Waters You Might Say. If Only We Could Figure A Way To Keep Those Darn Five Billion Shadows Under Those Trees, We Could Stay Up Half The Night, Doug, Because There'd Be No Night!

The Important Thing Is To Be In Love With Something.

Important Things

I've Grown Up On A Diet Of Metaphors. If Young Writers Would Find Those Writers Who Can Give Them Metaphors By The Bushel And The Peck, Then They'll Become Better Writers - To Learn How To Capsualize Things And Present Them In Metaphorical Form.

Time Is So Strange And Life Is Twice As Strange. You Must Promise Me Not To Live To Be Too Old, William. It If Is At All Convenient, Die Before You're Fifty. It My Take A Bit Of Doing. But I Advise This Is Simply Because There Is No Telling When Another Helen Loomis Might Be Born. It Would Be Dreadful, Wouldn't It, If You Lived On To Be Very Very Old And Some Afternoon In 1999 Walked Down Main Street And Saw Me Standing There, Aged Twenty-one, And The Whole Thing Out Of Balance Again?

I’m The Thing You Most Desire, You Represent The Thing I Least Desire, Death. It’s Just The Opposite Of Love.

He Felt His Smile Slide Away, Melt, Fold Over And Down On Itself Like A Tallow Skin, Like The Stuff Of A Fantastic Candle Burning Too Long And Now Collapsing And Now Blown Out.

At The Top Of Your Lungs, Shout And Listen To The Echoes. You Must Live Life At The Top Of Your Voice!

First Of All, It Was October, A Rare Month For Boys.

His Flesh Took Paleness From His Bones.

Thinking Little At All About Nothing In Particular.

First, Find Out What Your Hero Wants, Then Just Follow Him.

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, Coal-bins, 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.

You Don't Have To Burn Books To Destroy A Culture. Just Get People To Stop Reading Them.

He Lay Far Across The Room From Her, On A Winter Island Separated By An Empty Sea. She Talked To Him For What Seemed A Long While And She Talked About This And She Talked About That And It Was Only Words, Like The Words He Had Heard Once In A Nursery At A Friend's House, A Two-year-old Child Building Word Patters, Like Jargon, Making Pretty Sounds In The Air.

To Sum It All Up, If You Want To Write, If You Want To Create, You Must Be The Most Sublime Fool That God Ever Turned Out And Sent Rambling. You Must Write Every Single Day Of Your Life. You Must Write Dreadful Dumb Books And Glorious Books, And Let Them Wrestle In Beautiful Fights Inside Your Head, Vulgar One Moment, Brilliant The Next.

..holding A Book But Reading The Empty Spaces.

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.

Who Has More Pockets Than A Magician? A Boy. Whose Pockets Contain *more* Than A Magicians? A Boy's.

Video Games Are A Waste Of Time For Men With Nothing Else To Do.

Everything That Happens Before Death Is What Counts.

"that's Sad," Said Montag, Quietly, "because All We Put Into It Is Hunting And Finding And Killing. What A Shame If That's All It Can Ever Know."

Learning To Let Go Should Be Learned Before Learning To Get. Life Should Be Touched, Not Strangled.

Learn To Let Go

I Hate All Politics. I Don't Like Either Political Party. One Should Not Belong To Them - One Should Be An Individual, Standing In The Middle. Anyone That Belongs To A Party Stops Thinking.

You're Peculiar, You're Aggravating, Yet You're Easy To Forgive. You Say You're Seventeen?..how Odd. How Strange. And My Wife Thirty And Yet You Seem So Much Older At Times. I Can't Get Over It.

Out In The World Not Much Happened. But Here In The Special Night, A Land Bricked With Paper And Leather Anything Might Happen, Always Did.

How Talented Was Death. How Many Expressions And Manipulations Of Hand, Face, Body, No Two Alike.

I Went To Bed And Woke In The Middle Of The Night Thinking I Heard Someone Cry, Thinking I Myself Was Weeping, And I Felt My Face And It Was Dry. Then I Looked At The Window And Thought: Why, Yes, It's Just The Rain, The Rain, Always The Rain, And Turned Over, Sadder Still, And Fumbled About For My Dripping Sleep And Tried To Slip It Back On.

For Everyone Nowadays Knows, Absolutely Is Certain, That Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen To Me. Others Die, I Go On. There Are No Consequences And No Responsibilities. Except That There Are. But Let's Not Talk About Them, Eh? By The Time The Consequences Catch Up To You, It's Too Late, Isn't It, Montag?

To Feed Your Muse, Then, You Should Always Have Been Hungry About Life Since You Were A Child. If Not, It Is A Little Late To Start.

I Like To Watch People. Sometimes I Ride The Subway All Day And Look At Them And Listen To Them. I Just Want To Figure Out Who They Are And What They Want And Where They're Going.

What Are The Best Things And The Worst Things In Your Life, And When Are You Going To Get Around To Whispering Or Shouting Them?

I'm Trying To Teach People Of All Ages To, Number One: How To Criticize, How To Offer Creative Analysis On Top Of That, How To Try To Build Things In A New Direction And How To Compliment People When The Thing Gets Done.

Half The Fun Of The Travel Is The Esthetic Of Lostness.

All Of The Good, Weird Stories I’ve Written Are Based On Things I’ve Dredged Out Of My Subconscious. That’s The Real Stuff. Everything Else Is Fake.

You're Afraid Of Making Mistakes. Don't Be. Mistakes Can Be Profited By. Man, When I Was Young I Shoved My Ignorance In People's Faces. They Beat Me With Sticks. By The Time I Was Forty My Blunt Instrument Had Been Honed To A Fine Cutting Point For Me. If You Hide Your Ignorance, No One Will Hit You And You'll Never Learn.

They Walked Still Farther And The Girl Said, "is It True That Long Ago Firemen Put Fires Out Instead Of Going To Start Them?" No. Houses Have Always Been Fireproof, Take My Word For It." Strange. I Heard Once That A Long Time Ago Houses Used To Burn By Accident And They Needed Firemen To Stop The Flames.

You Let The Story Cool Off And Then, Instead Of Rewriting It, You Relive It.

Really Knowing Is Good. Not Knowing, Or Refusing To Know, Is Bad, Or Amoral, At Least. You Can't Act If You Don't Know. Acting Without Knowing Takes You Right Off The Cliff.

I Had Decided To Be A Magician Well Before I Decided To Be A Writer. I Was The Little Boy Who Would Get Up On-stage And Do Magic Wearing A Fake Mustache, Which Would Fall Off During The Performance. I'm Still Trying To Perform Those Tricks. Now I Do It With Writing.

Through Neglect, Ignorance, Or Inability, The New Intellectual Borgias Cram Hairballs Down Our Throats And Refuse Us The Convulsion That Could Make Us Well. They Have Forgotten, If They Ever Knew, The Ancient Knowledge That Only By Being Truly Sick Can One Regain Health. Even Beasts Know When It Is Good And Proper To Throw Up. Teach Me How To Be Sick Then, In The Right Time And Place, So That I May Again Walk In The Fields And With The Wise And Smiling Dogs Know Enough To Chew Sweet Grass.

I Often Wonder If God Recognizes His Own Son The Way We've Dressed Him Up, Or Is It Dressed Him Down?

Love What You Do And Do What You Love.

We Cannot Tell The Precise Moment When Friendship Is Formed. As In Filling A Vessel Drop By Drop, There Is At Last A Drop Which Makes It Run Over; So In A Series Of Kindnesses There Is At Last One Which Makes The Heart Run Over.

And Some Day Well Remember So Much That Well Build The Biggest Goddam Steamshovel In History And Dig The Biggest Grave Of All Time And Shove War In And Cover It Up.

Lone At Night, When I Was Twelve Years Old, I Looked At The Planet Mars And I Said, 'take Me Home!' And The Planet Mars Took Me Home, And I Never Came Back. So I've Written Every Day In The Last 75 Years. I've Never Stopped Writing.

The Gods Had Gone Away, And The Ritual Of The Religion Continued Senselessly, Uselessly.

Let The World Burn Through You. Throw The Prism Light, White Hot, On Paper.

A Witch Is Born Out Of The True Hungers Of Her Time,” She Said. “i Was Born Out Of New York. The Things That Are Most Wrong Here Summoned Me. ("drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")

I'll Tell You," Said Beatty, Smiling At His Cards. "that Made You For A Little While A Drunkard. Read A Few Lines And Off You Go Over The Cliff. Bang, You're Ready To Blow Up The World, Chop Off Heads, Knock Down Women And Children, Destroy Authority. I Know. I've Been Through It All.

An Athlete May Run Ten Thousand Miles In Order To Prepare For One Hundred Yards. Quantity Gives Experience.

I Like To Smell Things And Look At Things, And Sometimes Stay Up All Night, Walking, And Watch The Sun Rise.

My Goal Is To Entertain Myself And Others.

I Don't Think The Robots Are Taking Over. I Think The Men Who Play With Toys Have Taken Over. And If We Don't Take The Toys Out Of Their Hands, We're Fools.

Marriage Made People Old And Familiar, While Still Young.

The Sun Burnt Every Day. It Burnt Time. The World Rushed In A Circle And Turned On Its Axis And Time Was Busy Burning The Years And The People Anyway, Without Any Help From Him. So If He Burnt Things With The Firemen, And The Sun Burnt Time, That Meant Everything Burnt!

The Automobile Is The Most Dangerous Weapon In Our Society - Cars Kill More Than Wars Do.

Far Away, In The Meadow, Shadows Flickered In The Mirror's Maze, As If Parts Of Someone's Life, Yet Unborn, Were Trapped There, Waiting To Be Lived.

Most Of My Stories Are Ideas In Action. In Other Words, I Get A Concept, And I Let It Run Away. I Find A Character To Act Out The Idea. And Then The Story Takes Care Of Itself.

"oh, Ancient God, Whatever Your Name," Whispered Ahmed. "help This Lost Son Of A Good Father, This Evil Boy Who Meant No Harm But Slept In School, Ran Errands Slowly, Did Not Pray From His Heart, Ignored His Mother, And Did Not Hold His Family In Great Esteem. For All This I Know I Must Suffer. But Here In The Midst Of Silence, At The Desert's Heart, Where Even The Wind Knows Not My Name? Must I Die So Young? Am I To Be Forgotten Without Having Been?"

Your Mind's Always Juggling, Isn't It?-mirrors, Torches, Plates.

My Gosh, If You’re Going Away, We Got A Million Things To Talk About! All The Things We Would’ve Talked About Next Month, The Month After! Praying Mantises, Zeppelins, Acrobats, Sword Swallowers!

Every Time You Take A Step, Even When You Don't Want To. . . . When It Hurts, When It Means You Rub Chins With Death, Or Even If It Means Dying, That's Good. Anything That Moves Ahead, Wins. No Chess Game Was Ever Won By The Player Who Sat For A Lifetime Thinking Over His Next Move.

Fame And Money Are Gifts Given To Us Only After We Have Gifted The World With Our Best, Our Lonely, Our Individual Truths.

Thus Through Half-belief, We Are Often Doomed To Repeat That Very Past We Should Have Learned From.

Touch A Scientist And You Touch A Child.

The First Stories I Wrote When I Was 12 Were About Mars And Landing On Mars.

I Don't Like Being Up High. It Took Me Three Days To Get To The Top Of The Eiffel Tower.

The Television, 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.

Kill Two Birds With One Stone, Feed The Homeless To The Hungry.

Everything Is Generated Through Your Own Will Power. You Don't Have To Do Anything You Don't Want To Do. This Is A Democracy. You Go Where You Want To Go And Do What You Want To Do.

My Tunes And Numbers Are Here. They Have Filled My Years, The Years When I Refused To Die. And In Order To Do That I Wrote, I Wrote, I Wrote, At Noon Or 3:00 A.m. So As Not To Be Dead.

Gardening Is The Handiest Excuse For Being A Philosopher. Nobody Guesses, Nobody Accuses, Nobody Knows, But There You Are, Plato In The Peonies, Socrates Force-growing His Own Hemlock. A Man Toting A Sack Of Blood Manure Across His Lawn Is Kin To Atlas Letting The World Spin Easy On His Shoulder.

I’ve Often Been Accused Of Being Too Emotional And Sentimental, But I Believe In Honest Sentiment, And The Need To Purge Ourselves At Certain Times, Which Is Ancient. Men Would Live At Least Five Or Six More Years And Not Have Ulcers If They Could Cry Better.

Do What You Love And Love What You Do. Don’t Do Anything For Money. Everything Should Be For Love.

All Flesh Is One: What Matter Scores; Or Color Of The Suit Or If The Helmet Glints With Blue Or Gold? All Is One Bold Achievement, All Is Fine Spring-found-again-in-autumn Day When Juices Run In Antelopes Along Our Blood, And Green Our Flag, Forever Green...

We Need Not To Be Let Alone. We Need To Be Really Bothered Once In A While.

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder.

The Great Fun In My Life Has Been Getting Up Every Morning And Rushing To The Typewriter Because Some New Idea Has Hit Me.

Out Of The Nursery Into The College And Back Into The Nursery; There’s Your Intellectual Pattern For The Past Five Centuries Or More.

Write A Short Story Every Week. It's Not Possible To Write 52 Bad Short Stories In A Row.

I Don't Think About What I Do. I Do It. That's Buddhism. I Jump Off The Cliff And Build My Wings On The Way Down.

How Men Envy And Often Hate These Warm Clocks, These Wives, Who Know They Will Live Forever. So What Do We Do? We Men Turn Terribly Mean, Because We Can't Hold To The World Or Ourselves Or Anything. We Are Blind To Continuity, All Breaks Down, Falls, Melts, Stops, Rots, Or Runs Away. So, Since We Cannot Shape Time, Where Does That Leave Men? Sleepless. Staring.

I Don't Know Anything Anymore

When I Graduated From High School, It Was During The Depression And We Had No Money.

When Your Dawn Theater Sounds To Clear Your Sinuses: Don't Delay. Jump. Those Voices May Be Gone Before You Hit The Shower To Align Your Wits. Speed Is Everything. The 90-mph Dash To Your Machine Is A Sure Cure For Life Rampant And Death Most Real. Make Haste To Live. Oh, God, Yes. Live. And Write. With Great Haste.

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.

Life Is Like Underwear, Should Be Changed Twice A Day.

If You Have To Ask Yourself Whether Or Not You Love A Girl Or You Love A Boy, Forget It. You Don't.

Don't Write For Money. Write Because You Love To Do Something. If You Write For Money, You Won't Write Anything Worth Reading.

We Should Have Stayed On The Moon. We Should Have Made Moon The Base, Instead Of Building Space Stations, Which Are Fragile And Which Fly Apart.

We Are Anthill Men Upon An Anthill World.

My Stories Run Up And Bite Me On The Leg - I Respond By Writing Down Everything That Goes On During The Bite. When I Finish, The Idea Lets Go And Runs Off.

We've Let Too Much Time Go By. We've Been Busy With War Instead Of Being Busy With Peace. And That's What Space Travel Is All About. It's All About Peace And Exploration And Wonder And Beauty.

He Says I'm A Regular Onion! I Keep Him Busy Peeling Away The Layers.

I'll Be Damned If Death Wears My Sadness For Glad Rags.

I Have My Favorite Cat, Who Is My Paperweight, On My Desk While I Am Writing.

Kids Love Me Because I Write Stories That Tell Them About Their Capacity For Evil. I'm One Of The Few Writers Who Lets You Cleanse Yourself That Way.

From The Outer Edge Of His Life, Looking Back, There Was Only One Remorse, And That Was Only That He Wished To Go On Living.

It Was In Their Friendship They Just Wanted To Run Forever, Shadow And Shadow.

I Want To Feel All There Is To Feel, He Thought. Let Me Feel Tired, Now, Let Me Feel Tired. I Mustn't Forget, I'm Alive, I Know I'm Alive, I Mustn't Forget It Tonight Or Tomorrow Or The Day After That.

You Feed Yourself. Make Sure You Have All The Information, Whether It's Aesthetic, Scientific, Mathematical, I Don't Care What It Is. Then You Walk Away From It And Let It Ferment. You Ignore It And Pretend You Don't Care. Next Thing You Know, The Answer Comes.

We're All Fools," Said Clemens, "all The Time. It's Just We're A Different Kind Each Day. We Think, I'm Not A Fool Today. I've Learned My Lesson. I Was A Fool Yesterday But Not This Morning. Then Tomorrow We Find Out That, Yes, We Were A Fool Today Too. I Think The Only Way We Can Grow And Get On In This World Is To Accept The Fact We're Not Perfect And Live Accordingly.

If You're Reluctant To Weep, You Won't Live A Full And Complete Life.

Man Has Always Been Half-monster, Half-dreamer.

Through Lack Of Education, We're Not Teaching Kids To Read And Write. So There Is The Danger That You Raise Up A Generation Of Morons.

We Travel For Romance, We Travel For Architecture, And We Travel To Be Lost.

I Don't Tell Anyone How To Write And No One Tells Me.

I Believe In Creative Failing - To Contine To Write Poems That Fail And Fail And Fail Until A Day Comes When You've Got A Thousand Poems Behind You And You're Relaxed And You Finally Write A Good Poem.

The One Sure Way I Can Dishonor Myself Is By Worrying About My Reputation.

I Don't Believe In Colleges And Universities. I Believe In Libraries Because Most Students Don't Have Any Money. When I Graduated From High School, It Was During The Depression And We Had No Money. I Couldn't Go To College, So I Went To The Library Three Days A Week For 10 Years.

I Have Fun With Ideas; I Play With Them.

The Books Leapt And Danced Like Roasted Birds, Their Wings Ablaze With Red And Yellow Feathers.

I Feel Like I Own All The Kids In The World Because, Since I've Never Grown Up Myself, All My Books Are Automatically For Children.

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.

Shut The Door, They're Coming Through The Window, Shut The Window, They're Coming Through The Door," Are The Words To An Old Song. They Fit My Lifestyle With Newly Arriving Butcher/censors Every Month. Only Six Weeks 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 Censorship And Book-burning In The Future, Write To Tell Me Of This Exquisite Irony.

You Can't Try To Do Things; You Simply Must Do Them.

Thinking Of You

My Personal Telephone Book Is A Book Of The Dead Now. I'm So Old. Almost All Of My Friends Have Died, And I Don't Have The Guts To Take Their Names Out Of The Book.

The Things That You Do Should Be Things That You Love, And Things That You Love Should Be Things That You Do.

We Have Everything We Need To Be Happy, But We Aren't Happy. Something's Missing.

Fahrenheit 451 Book

Why Would You Clone People When You Can Go To Bed With Them And Make A Baby? C'mon, It's Stupid.

This Is The Result Of Six Billion Years Of Evolution. Tonight, We Have Given The Lie To Gravity.we Have Reached For The Stars.

There Is Only One Type Of Story In The World-your Story.

And Suddenly Everything, Absolutely Everything, Was There.

Every Story I've Written Was Written Because I Had To Write It. Writing Stories Is Like Breathing For Me; It Is My Life.

I'm Not A Science-fiction Writer. I've Only Written One Book That's Science Fiction, And That's Fahrenheit 451. All The Others Are Fantasy.

Forget Them. Burn All, Burn Everything. Fire Is Bright And Fire Is Clean.

The Faster You Blurt, The More Swiftly You Write, The More Honest You Are.

Putting Out The Stars And Extinguishing The Sun.

He Wore His Happiness Like A Mask And The Girl Had Run Off Across The Lawn With The Mask And There Was No Way Of Going To Knock On Her Door And Ask For It Back.

Painting Fulfills A Need To Be Non-intellectual. There Are Times When We Have To Get Our Brains Out In Our Fingers.

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