Background Image

...

Important Thing Is Not The Me That's Lying Here, But The Me That's Sitting On The Edge Of The Bed Looking Back At Me, And The Me That's Downstairs Cooking Supper, Or Out In The Garage Under The Car, Or In The Library Reading. All The New Parts, They Count. I'm Not Really Dying Today. No Person Ever Died That Had A Family.

-Ray Bradbury

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Important Thing Is Not

Ray Bradbury

...

Important Thing Is Not The Me That's Lying Here, But The Me That's Sitting On The Edge Of The Bed Looking Back At Me, And The Me That's Downstairs Cooking Supper, Or Out In The Garage Under The Car, Or In The Library Reading. All The New Parts, They Count. I'm Not Really Dying Today. No Person Ever Died That Had A Family.

Views: 8

Topic

More From Ray Bradbury

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

Get Rid Of Those Friends Of Yours Who Make Fun Of You And Don't Believe In You. And When You Leave Here Tonight, Go Home, Make A Phone Call And Fire Them. Anyone That Doesn't Believe In You And Your Future, To Hell With Them.

Putting Out The Stars And Extinguishing The Sun.

Writing Is Supposed To Be Difficult, Agonizing, A Dreadful Exercise, A Terrible Occupation.

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.

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.

You've Got To Be Able To Look At Your Thoughts On Paper And Discover What A Fool You Were.

Nobody Listens Anymore. I Can't Talk To The Walls Because They're Yelling At Me, I Can't Talk To My Wife; She Listens To The Walls. I Just Want Someone To Hear What I Have To Say. And Maybe If I Talk Long Enough It'll Make Sense. And I Want You To Teach Me To Understand What I Read.

So Few Want To Be Rebels Anymore. And Out Of Those Few, Most, Like Myself, Scare Easily.

How Do You Get So Empty? Who Takes It Out Of You?

Can't You Recognize The Human In The Inhuman?

Martian Chronicles

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.

In Order For A Thing To Be Horrible It Has To Suffer A Change You Can Recognize.

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

I Have Fun With Ideas; I Play With Them.

He Glanced Back At The Wall. How Like A Mirror, Too, Her Face. Impossible; For How Many People Did You Know Who Reflected Your Own Light To You? People Were More Often--he Searched For A Simile, Found One In His Work--torches, Blazing Away Until They Whiffed Out. How Rarely Did Other People's Faces Take Of You And Throw Back To You Your Own Expression, Your Own Innermost Trembling Thought?

The History Of Science Fiction Started In The Caves 20,000 Years Ago. The Ideas On The Walls Of The Cave Were Problems To Be Solved. It's Problem Solving. Primitive Scientific Knowledge, Primitive Dreams, Primitive Blueprinting: To Solve Problems.

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.

I Used To Take My Short Stories To Girls' Homes And Read Them To Them. Can You Imagine The Reaction Reading A Short Story To A Girl Instead Of Pawing Her?

Science Fiction Is A Great Way To Pretend You Are Writing About The Future When In Reality You Are Attacking The Recent Past And The Present. You Can Criticize Communists, Racists, Fascists Or Any Other Clear And Present Danger, And They Can't Imagine You Are Writing About Them.

You're Either In Love With What You Do, Or You're Not In Love.

A Good Night Sleep, Or A Ten Minute Bawl, Or A Pint Of Chocolate Ice Cream, Or All Three Together, Is Good Medicine.

Chocolate Ice Cream

You Either Have An Imaginative Mind Or You Don't. All Of My Writing Is God-given. I Don't Write My Stories - They Write Themselves.

If You Had Your Way You’d Pass A Law To Abolish All The Little Jobs, The Little Things. But Then You’d Leave Yourselves Nothing To Do Between The Big Jobs And You’d Have A Devil Of A Time Thinking Up Things To Do So You Wouldn’t Go Crazy. Instead Of That, Why Not Let Nature Show You A Few Things? Cutting Grass And Pulling Weeds Can Be A Way Of Life, Son.

When The Wind Is Right, A Faint Odor Of Kerosene Is Exhaled From Senator Mccarthy.

We Are The Witnesses To The Miracle. We Are Put Here By Creation, By God....we're Here To Be The Audience To The Magnificent. It Is Our Job To Celebrate.

Ah, Art! Ah, Life! The Pendulum Swinging Back And Forth, From Complex To Simple, Again To Complex. From Romantic To Realistic, Back To Romantic.

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, Last Night. The Others Would Never Do That. The Others Would Walk Off And Leave Me Talking. Or Threaten Me. No One Has Time Any More For Anyone Else. You're One Of The Few Who Put Up With Me. That's Why I Think It's So Strange You're A Fireman, It Just Doesn't Seem Right For You, Somehow.

When I Started Writing Seriously, I Made The Major Discovery Of My Life - That I Am Right And Everybody Else Is Wrong If They Disagree With Me. What A Great Thing To Learn: Don't Listen To Anyone Else, And Always Go Your Own Way.

How To Feel Your Way Toward Something Honest, Hidden Under The Trapdoor On The Top Of Your Skull.

Is It True, The World Works Hard And We Play? Is That Why We're Hated So Much?

And Besides, I Like To Cry. After I Cry Hard It's Like It's Morning Again And I'm Starting The Day Over.

It Takes Writing A Billion Bad Words Before You Get To The Good Ones.

They Crashed The Front Door And Grabbed At A Woman, Though She Was Not Running, She Was Not Trying To Escape. She Was Only Standing, Weaving From Side To Side, Her Eyes Fixed Upon A Nothingness In The Wall As If They Had Struck Her A Terrible Blow Upon The Head. Her Tongue Was Moving In Her Mouth, And Her Eyes Seemed To Be Trying To Remember Something, And Then They Remembered And Her Tongue Moved Again: "play The Man, Master Ridley; We Shall This Day Light Such A Candle, By God's Grace, In England, As I Trust Shall Never Be Put Out.

If You Did Not Write Every Day, The Poisons Would Accumulate And You Would Begin To Die, Or Act Crazy Or Both-you Must Stay Drunk On Writing So Reality Cannot Destroy You.

Mr. Montag, You Are Looking At A Coward. I Saw The Way Things Were Going A Long Time Back. I Said Nothing. I Am 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.

We Are Anthill Men Upon An Anthill World.

Sometimes You Just Have To Jump Out The Window And Grow Wings On The Way Down.

When Rivers Flooded, When Fire Fell From The Sky, What A Fine Place The Library Was, The Many Rooms, The Books. With Luck, No One Found You. How Could They!--when You Were Off To Tanganyika In '98, Cairo In 1812, Florence In 1492!?

I Define Science Fiction As The Art Of The Possible. Fantasy Is The Art Of The Impossible.

You Can’t Learn To Write In College. It’s A Very Bad Place For Writers Because The Teachers Always Think They Know More Than You Do-and They Don’t. They Have Prejudices.

Heaven Is A House With Porch Lights.

We Are All . . . Children Of This Universe. Not Just Earth, Or Mars, Or This System, But The Whole Grand Fireworks. And If We Are Interested In Mars At All, It Is Only Because We Wonder Over Our Past And Worry Terribly About Our Possible Future.

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.

The Wind Outside Nested In Each Tree, Prowled The Sidewalks In Invisible Treads Like Unseen Cats. Tom Skelton Shivered. Anyone Could See That The Wind Was A Special Wind This Night, And The Darkness Took On A Special Feel Because It Was All Hallows' Eve. Everything Seemed Cut From Soft Black Velvet Or Gold Or Orange Velvet. Smoke Panted Up Out Of A Thousand Chimneys Like The Plumes Of Funeral Parades. From Kitchen Windows Drifted Two Pumpkin Smells: Gourds Being Cut, Pies Being Baked.

The Universe Has Shouted Itself Alive. We Are One Of The Shouts.

Martian Chronicles

Ideas And Philosophies Change Just As Machines Do. Religions Changed Because Of The Birth Control Pill. Politics Changes Because Of The Hydrogen Bomb. All Because Of Science Fictional Inventions.

The Rockets Set The Bony Meadows Afire, Turned Rock To Lava, Turned Wood To Charcoal, Transmuted Water To Steam, Made Sand And Silica Into Green Glass Which Lay Like Shattered Mirrors Reflecting The Invasion, All About. The Rockets Came Like Drums, Beating In The Night. The Rockets Came Like Locusts, Swarming And Settling In Blooms Of Rosy Smoke.

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

Into The Air, Over The Valleys, Under The Stars, Above A River, A Pond, A Road, Flew Cecy. Invisible As New Spring Winds, Fresh As The Breath Of Clover Rising From Twilight Fields, She Flew.

I Write All Of My Novels And Stories, As You Have Seen, In A Great Surge Of Delightful Passion. Only Recently, Glancing At The Novel, I Realized That Montag Is Named After A Paper Manufacturing Company. And Faber, Of Course, Is A Maker Of Pencils! What A Sly Thing My Subconscious Was, To Name Them Thus. And Not Tell Me!

The Train Skimmed On Softly, Slithering, Black Pennants Fluttering, Black Confetti Lost On Its Own Sick-sweet Candy Wind, Down The Hill, With The Two Boys Pursuing, The Air Was So Cold They Ate Ice Cream With Each Breath.

You Must Never Name The Goal. You Must Never Tell Us The Target You're Hitting For. You Must Automatically Go Toward It Without Ever Naming It.

Now Let's Take Up The Minorities In Our Civilisation, Shall We? Bigger The Population, The More Minorities. Don't Step On The Toes Of The Dog-lovers, The Cat-lovers, Doctors, Lawyers, Merchants, Chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, Second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, People From Oregon Or Mexico. The People In This Book, This Play, This Tv Serial Are Not Meant To Represent Any Actual Painters, Cartographers, Mechanics Anywhere. The Bigger Your Market, Montag, The Less You Handle Controversy, Remember That!

What Is The Subconscious To Every Other Man, In Its Creative Aspect Becomes, For Writers, The Muse.

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

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.

We Are Cups, Constantly And Quietly Being Filled. The Trick Is Knowing How To Tip Ourselves Over And Let The Beautiful Stuff Out.

I Love All Of The Arts. I Love Motion Pictures. I Love Stage. I Love Theater.

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.

There Are Certain Kinds Of People Who Write Science Fiction. I Think A Lot Of Us Married Late. A Lot Of Us Are Mama's Boys. I Lived At Home Until I Was 27. But Most Of The Writers I Know In Any Field, Especially Science Fiction, Grew Up Late. They're So Interested In Doing What They Do And In Their Science, They Don't Think About Other Things.

If We Listened To Our Intellect, We'd Never Have A Love Affair. We'd Never Have A Friendship. We'd Never Go Into Business, Because We'd Be Cynical. Well, That's Nonsense. You've Got To Jump Off Cliffs All The Time And Build Your Wings On The Way Down.

Journalism Keeps You Planted In The Earth.

I Think The Reason My Stories Have Been So Successful Is That I Have A Strong Sense Of Metaphor.

So There You Have It, A Lifetime Of First Smelling The Books, They All Smell Wonderful, Reading The Books, Loving The Books, And Remembering The Books.

Jump, And You Will Find Out How To Unfold Your Wings As You Fall.

I’m Really Alive! He Thought. I Never Knew It Before, Or If I Did I Don’t Remember!

Ask No Guarantees, Ask For No Security, There Never Was Such An Animal. And If There Was It Would Be Related To The Great Sloth Which Hangs Upside Down In A Tree All Day Every Day, Sleeping Its Life Away.

You Have To Know How To Accept Rejection And Reject Acceptance.

We Meet On The Common Ground Of An Uncommon Age And Share Out Our Gifts Of Dark And Light, Good And Bad, Simple Joy And Not So Simple Sorrow.

It Was A Pleasure To Burn.

Write. Don't Think. Relax.

We Can't Live Alone In Any Society. But The Best Way To Help A Society Or Group, Is To Be The Best Individual In It That We Can Be.

But With The Library, It's Like Catnip, I Suppose: You Begin To Run In Circles Because There's So Much To Look At And Read.

Don't Ask For Guarantees. And Don't Look To Be Saved In Any One Thing, Person, Machine, Or Library. Do Your Own Bit Of Saving, And If You Drown, At Least Die Knowing You Were Heading For Shore.

Please, Please, Help Me Grow To Be Like Them, The Ones'll Soon Be Here, Who Never Grow Old, Can't Die, That's What They Say, Can't Die, No Matter What, Or Maybe They Died A Long Time Ago But Cecy Calls, And Mother And Father Call, And Grandmere Who Only Whispers, And Now They're Coming And I'm Nothing, Not Like Them Who Pass Through Walls And Live In Trees Or Live Underneath Until Seventeen-year Rains Flood Them Up And Out, And The Ones Who Run In Packs, Let Me Be The One! If They Live Forever, Why Not Me?

Without Libraries What Have We? We Have No Past And No Future.

And What, You Ask, Does Writing Teach Us? First And Foremost, It Reminds Us That We Are Alive And That It Is Gift And A Privilege, Not A Right. 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.

God, Here And There, Makes Madness A Calling.

Venice Was And Is Full Of Lost Places Where People Put Up For Sale The Last Worn Bits Of Their Souls, Hoping No One Will Buy.

The Television Is 'real'. It Is Immediate, It Has Dimension. It Tells You What To Think And Blasts It In. It Must Be Right. It Seems So Right. It Rushes You On So Quickly To Its Own Conclusions Your Mind Hasn't Time To Protest, 'what Nonsense!'.

I Was Partially Raised By An Aunt Who Was A Dress Designer, So I Was Around Her Studio All Of My Early Life. I Know Materials. I Can Look Through Harper's Bazaar And Decide What Works And What Doesn't, Or Any Other Magazine, Seventeen If You Wish.

When You Write - Explode - Fly Apart - Disintegrate! Then Give Time Enough To Think, Cut, Rework, And Rewrite.

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.

There's A Lot Of Crap Out There. Most Of The Science Fiction Films Alone Are Abominations, You Know. They're Mindless. So You Can't Learn From Those Kinds Of Films.

You Will Have To Write And Put Away Or Burn A Lot Of Material Before You Are Comfortable In This Medium. You Might As Well Start Now And Get The Work Done. For I Believe That Eventually Quantity Will Make For Quality.

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

Science Fiction Is Any Idea That Occurs In The Head And Doesn't Exist Yet, But Soon Will, And Will Change Everything For Everybody, And Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again. As Soon As You Have An Idea That Changes Some Small Part Of The World You Are Writing Science Fiction. It Is Always The Art Of The Possible, Never The Impossible.

[he] Was Always Here To Offer Cups Of Good Clear Walden Pond, Or Shout Down The Deep Well Of Shakespeare And Listen, With Satisfaction, For Echoes. Here The Lion And The Hartebeest Lay Together, Here The Jackass Became A Unicorn.

The Local Tv News Is The Greatest Danger In Your Life. It's All Crap.

It Is A Lie To Write In Such Way As To Be Rewarded By Fame Offered You By Some Snobbish Quasi-literary Groups In The Intellectual Gazettes.

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

Do You Ever Wonder If--well, If There Are People Living On The Third Planet?' 'the Third Planet Is Incapable Of Supporting Life,' Stated The Husband Patiently. 'our Scientists Have Said There's Far Too Much Oxygen In Their Atmosphere.

But Most Of All, 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 Are Going. Sometimes I Even Go To Fun Parks And Ride In The Jet Cars When They Race On The Edge Of Town At Midnight And The Police Don't Care As Long As They're Insured. As Long As Everyone Has Ten Thousand Insurance Everyone's Happy. Sometimes I Sneak Around And Listen In Subways. Or I Listen At Soda Fountains, And Do You Know What? People Don't Talk About Anything.

The Very First Experiments With Building Rockets And Firing Them Off Were Carried Out By Students At Cal Tech In 1937, '38 And '39. And Later These People Put Together These Jet Propulsion Labs In Pasadena And Wound Up Sending Aircraft And Spacecraft To The Moon. So It All Began Very Primitively With Love.

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.

Write 1000 Words A Day. That's Only About Four Pages, But Force Yourself To Do It. Put Your Finger Down Your Throat And Throw Up. That's What Writing's All About.

And The Odd Think In Dad's Voice Was The Sound Truth Makes Being Said.

The Lord Is Not Serious. In Fact, It Is A Little Hard To Know Just What Else He Is Except Loving. And Love Has To Do With Humor, Doesn't It? For You Cannot Love Someone Unless You Put Up With Him, Can You? And You Cannot Put Up With Someone Constantly Unless You Can Laugh At Him. Isn't That True? And Certainly We Are Rediculous Little Animals Wallowing In The Fudge Bowl, And God Must Love Us All The More Because We Appeal To His Humor.

In Science Fiction, We Dream. In Order To Colonize In Space, To Rebuild Our Cities, Which Are So Far Out Of Whack, To Tackle Any Number Of Problems, We Must Imagine The Future, Including The New Technologies That Are Required.

And There, Row Upon Row, With The Soft Gleam Of Flowers Opened At Morning, With The Light Of This June Sun Glowing Through A Faint Skin Of Dust, Would Stand The Dandelion Wine. Peer Through It At The Wintry Day - The Snow Melted To Grass, The Trees Were Reinhabitated With Bird, Leaf, And Blossoms Like A Continent Of Butterflies Breathing On The Wind. And Peering Through, Color Sky From Iron To Blue. Hold Summer In Your Hand, Pour Summer In A Glass, A Tiny Glass Of Course, The Smallest Tingling Sip For Children; Change The Season In Your Veins By Raising Glass To Lip And Tilting Summer In

I Take This Continent With Me Into The Grave.

To Solve The Drug Problem, We Have To Start At The Root - First Grade. If A Boy Has All The Toys In His Head That Reading Can Give Him, And You Hook Him Into Science Fiction, Then You've Got The Future Secured.

Without The Library, You Have No Civilization.

I Am Madness Maddened When It Comes To Books, Writers, And The Great Granary Silos Where Their Wits Are Stored.

Orwell Was Dealing With Communism And His Disillusionment With Communism In Russia And What He Saw The Communists Do In Spain. His Novel Was A Response To Those Political Situations. Whereas I Was Interested In More Things Than The Political Atmosphere. I Was Considering The Whole Social Atmosphere: The Impact Of Tv And Radio And The Lack Of Education. I Could See The Coming Event Of Schoolteachers Not Teaching Reading Anymore. The Less They Taught, The More You Wouldn't Need Books.

If You Know How To Read, You Have A Complete Education About Life, Then You Know How To Vote Within A Democracy. But If You Don't Know How To Read, You Don't Know How To Decide. That's The Great Thing About Our Country - We're A Democracy Of Readers, And We Should Keep It That Way.

Looking Back Over A Lifetime, You See That Love Was The Answer To Everything.

It's Lack That Gives Us Inspiration. It's Not Fullness.

The Human Race Likes To Give Itself Airs. One Good Volcano Can Produce More Greenhouse Gases In A Year Than The Human Race Has In Its Entire History.

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

Reality And Fiction Are Different In That Fiction Has To Make Sense.

To Everything There Is A Season. Yes. A Time To Break Down, And A Time To Build Up. Yes. A Time To Keep Silence And A Time To Speak. Yes.

If You Love People You Criticize Them, And If You Don't Love Them You Don't Criticize Them, You Let Them Go To Hell, Don't You? To Help Any Kind Of Friendship, Your Marriage, Your Children, You Criticize Because You Love.

If Someone Sends You A Love Letter You've Got To Answer Back.

He Knew What The Wind Was Doing To Them, Where It Was Taking Them, To All The Secret Places That Were Never So Secret Again In Life.

Action Is Hope. There Is No Hope Without Action.

What Is It About Fire That's So Lovely? No Matter What Age We Are, What Draws Us To It?...the Thing Man Wanted To Invent, But Never Did...if You Let It Go On, It'd Burn Our Lifetimes Out. What Is Fire? It Is A Mystery. Scientists Give Us Gobbledygook About Friction And Molecules. But They Don't Really Know. Its Real Beauty Is That It Destroys Responsibility And Consequences.

When I Was A Young Man, I Didn't Think About Having A Family. My Wife And I Were Too Poor To Have Babies. Then All Of A Sudden, One Came Along And Scared The Hell Out Of Us Because We Had No Money. Once The Baby Arrives, You Make Do Somehow. You Fall In Love With The Baby And Life Adjusts Itself. You Find You Don't Need As Much Money As You Thought. When That Happens, You Can Ask The Questions That Should Have Come Before The Baby.

Falling In Love

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

Fahrenheit 451 Book

Teachers Are To Inspire; Librarians Are To Fulfill.

Suddenly The Day Was Gone, Night Came Out From Under Each Tree And Spread.

We Earth Men Have A Talent For Ruining Big, Beautiful Things.

Sniff Books Like Perfumes And Wear Books Like Hats Upon Your Crazy Heads.

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.

Do What You Love, Don't Do Anything Else.

I Have Spent My Life Going From Mania To Mania. Somehow It Has All Paid Off.

May You Be In Love Every Day For The Next 20,000 Days. And Out Of That Love, Remake A World.

Tell Us Again, For We Forget, That Work Done Without Love Is Stillborn, Mindless, And Lost In The Very Hour Of Its Deliverance.

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

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.

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

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.

We Do Need Knowledge. And Perhaps In A Thousand Years We Might Pick Smaller Cliffs To Jump Off. The Books Are To Remind Us What Asses And Fools We Are.

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.

I Was Only Kicking Down The Christmas Tree To Get The Star On Top.

Life Is About Trying Things To See If They Work.

A Book Is A Loaded Gun.

My Goal Is To Entertain Myself And Others.

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.

I've Never Been In Charge Of My Stories, They've Always Been In Charge Of Me. As Each New One Has Called To Me, Ordering Me To Give It Voice And Form And Life, I've Followed The Advice I've Shared With Other Writers Over The Years: Jump Off The Cliff And Build Your Wings On The Way Down.

People Who Take Books On Sex To Bed Become Frigid. You Get Self-conscious. You Can't Think A Story. You Can't Think, "i Shall Do A Story To Improve Mankind." Well, It's Nonsense. All The Great Stories, All The Really Worthwhile Plays, Are Emotional Experiences. If You Have To Ask Yourself Whether Or Not You Love A Girl Or You Love A Boy, Forget It. You Don't. A Story Is The Same Way. You Either Feel A Story And Need To Write It, Or You Better Not Write It.

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.

And What, You Ask, Does Writing Teach Us? First And Foremost, It Reminds Us That We Are Alive And That It Is A Gift And A Privilege, Not A Right.

Mother: Why, Just Lying There, Jim, You Run So Fast. I Never Saw Anyone Move So Much, Just Sleeping. Promise Me, Jim. Wherever You Go And Come Back, Bring Lots Of Kids. Let Them Run Wild. Let Me Spoil Them, Some Day. Jim: I'm Never Going To Own Anything That Can Hurt Me.

Night Had Come On Like The Closing Of A Great But Gentle Eye.

Joy Is The Grace We Say To God.

All Of Us, No Matter How We Look Born Into This World, Feel Something Like The Hunchback. It Doesn't Matter If You Have A Beautiful Face Or Not.

You'd Type Like Hell. I Spent $9.80 And In Nine Days I Had Fahrenheit 451.

I Love You And I Forgive You. I Am Like You And You Are Like Me. I Love All People. I Love The World. I Love Creating. Everything In Our Life Should Be Based On Love.

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder.

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.

Beware The Autumn People

I'm Not A Serious Person, And I Don't Like Serious People.

I've Been Writing Every Day Of My Life For 65 Years.

Writing Every Day

I Believe In Darwin And God Together.

I Don't Like Realism. We Already Know The Real Facts About Li[fe], Most Of The Basic Facts. I'm Not Interested In Repeating What We Already Know. We Know About Sex, About Violence, About Murder, About War. All These Things, By The Time We're 18, We're Up To Here. From There On We Need Interpreters. We Need Poets. We Need Philosophers. We Need Theologians, Who Take The Same Basic Facts And Work With Them And Help Us Make Do With Those Facts. Facts Alone Are Not Enough. It's Interpretation.

But No Man's A Hero To Himself.

You Take The Books, You Lie There In The Pools Of Light And You Drink Life. That Is How Intensely I Have Loved Libraries.

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.

All Education Is Self-discovery.

There Where Hundreds Of Graves. There Where Hundreds Of Women. There Were Hundreds Of Daughters. There Were Hundreds Of Sons. And Hundreds Upon Hundreds Upon Thousands Of Candles. The Whole Graveyard Was One Swarm Of Candleshine As If A Population Of Fireflies Had Heard Of A Grand Conglomeration And Had Flown Here To Settle In And Flame Upon The Stones And Light The Brown Faces And The Dark Eyes And The Black Hair.

Insanity Is Relative. It Depends On Who Has Who Locked In What Cage.

The Average Tv Commercial Of Sixty Seconds Has One Hundred And Twenty Half-second Clips In It, Or One-third Of A Second. We Bombard People With Sensation. That Substitutes For Thinking.

What Church Could Compete With The Fireworks Of The Pure Soul?

The Best Scientist Is Open To Experience And Begins With Romance - The Idea That Anything Is Possible.

Why Go To A Machine When You Could Go To A Human Being?

People Want To Be Happy, Isn't That Right? Haven't You Heard It All Your Life? I Want To Be Happy, People Say. Well, Aren't They? Don't We Keep Them Moving, Don't We Give Them Fun? That's All We Live For, Isn't It? For Pleasure, For Titillation? And You Must Admit Our Culture Provides Plenty Of These.

This Was All He Wanted Now. Some Signs That The Immense World Would Accept Him And Give Him The Long Time He Needed To Think All The Things That Must Be Thought.

Not To Write, For Many Of Us, Is To Die.

I Came On The Old And Best Ways Of Writing Through Ignorance And Experiment And Was Startled When Truths Leaped Out Of Brushes Like Quail Before Gunshot.

The Great Thing About My Life Is That Everything I've Done Is A Result Of What I Was When I Was 12 Or 13.

I Believe The Universe Created Us - We Are An Audience For Miracles. In That Sense, I Guess, I'm Religious.

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.

Disbelief Is Catching. It Rubs Off On People.

The Answer To All Writing, To Any Career For That Matter, Is Love.

My Parents Read The Comics To Me, And I Fell In Love With Comic Strips. I've Collected Them All Of My Life. I Have A Complete Collection Of All The "buck Rogers" Sunday Funnies And Daily Paper Strips, I Have All Of "prince Valiant" Put Away, All Of "tarzan," Which Appeared In The Sunday Funnies In 1932 Right On Up Through High School. So I've Learned A Lot From Reading Comics As A Child.

Dandelion Wine. The Words Were Summer On The Tongue. The Wine Was Summer Caught And Stoppered...sealed Away For Opening On A January Day With Snow Falling Fast And The Sun Unseen For Weeks.

When You Grow Up In Science Fiction You Grow Up In Everything! It's The Greatest And Only Field Worth Growing Up In. It's The Total Field.

With School 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.

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

We're A Free Society; We've Got Television. We Have Radio. We Have Newspapers. We Have The Videocassette, Which Is Coming Into Play. These Are New Freedoms.

But We Do Need A Breather. We Do Need Knowledge. And Perhaps In A Thousand Years We Might Pick Smaller Cliffs To Jump Off. The Books Are To Remind Us What Asses And Fools We Are. They’re Caesar’s Praetorian Guard, Whispering As The Parade Roars Down The Avenue, ‘remember, Caesar, Thou Art Mortal.’ Most Of Us Can’t Rush Around, Talk To Everyone, Know All The Cities Of The World, We Haven’t Time, Money Or That Many Friends. The Things You’re Looking For, Montag, Are In The World, But The Only Way The Average Chap Will Ever See Ninety-nine Per Cent Of Them Is In A Book.

Death Doesn't Exist. It Never Did, It Never Will. But We've Drawn So Many Pictures Of It, So Many Years, Trying To Pin It Down, Comprehend It, We've Got To Thinking Of It As An Entity, Strangely Alive And Greedy. All It Is, However, Is A Stopped Watch, A Loss, An End, A Darkness. Nothing.

If Someone Tells You To Do Something For Money, Tell Them To Go To Hell.

You Knew The Sweetness Of Now, Now, Tonight! Who Cares For Tomorrow, Tomorrow Is Nothing, Yesterday Is Over And Done, Tonight Live, Tonight!

Since Everything Is But An Apparition, Having Nothing To Do With Good Or Bad, Acceptance Or Rejection, One May Well Burst Out In Laughter. Longchenpa Let's Stuff Our Eyes With Wonder, Let's Live As If We'd Drop Dead In Ten Seconds. Let's See The World. It's More Fantastic Than Any Dream Made Or Paid For In Factories.

Surprise Is Where Creativity Comes In.

We Were Put Here As Witnesses To The Miracle Of Life. We See The Stars, And We Want Them. We Are Beholden To Give Back To The Universe. If We Make Landfall On Another Star System, We Become Immortal.

You Have To Be Very Productive In Order To Become Excellent. You Have To Go Through A Poor Period And A Mediocre Period, And Then You Move Into Your Excellent Period. It May Be Very Well Be That Some Of You Have Done Quite A Bit Of Writing Already. You Maybe Ready To Move Into Your Good Period And Your Excellent Period. But You Shouldn't Be Surprised If It Becomes A Very Long Process.

The Zipper Displaces The Button And A Man Lacks Just That Much Time To Think While Dressing At Dawn, A Philosophical Hour, And Thus A Melancholy Hour.

They Are So Confident That They Will Run On Forever. But They Won't Run On. They Don't Know That This Is All One Huge Big Blazing Meteor That Makes A Pretty Fire In Space, But That Some Day It'll Have To Hit.

If You Have Moved Over Vast Territories And Dared To Love Silly Things, You Will Have Learned Even From The Most Primitive Items Collected And Put Aside In Your Life.

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.

Everyone Must Leave Something Behind When He Dies, My Grandfather Said. A Child Or A Book Or A Painting Or A House Or A Wall Built Or A Pair Of Shoes Made. Or A Garden Planted. Something Your Hand Touched Some Way So Your Soul Has Somewhere To Go When You Die, And When People Look At That Tree Or That Flower You Planted, You're There.

Touch A Scientist And You Touch A Child.

It Didn't Come From The Government Down. There Was No Dictum, No Declaration, No Censorship, To Start With, No! Technology, Mass Exploitation, And Minority Pressure Carried The Trick, Thank God.

The Huge Round Lunar Clock Was A Gristmill. Shake Down All The Grains Of Time—the Big Grains Of Centuries, And The Small Grains Of Years, And The Tiny Grains Of Hours And Minutes—and The Clock Pulverized Them, Slid Time Silently Out In All Directions In A Fine Pollen, Carried By Cold Winds To Blanket The Town Like Dust, Everywhere. Spores From That Clock Lodged In Your Flesh To Wrinkle It, To Grow Bones To Monstrous Size, To Burst Feet From Shoes Like Turnips. Oh, How That Great Machine…dispensed Time In Blowing Weathers.

...we're Allotted A Little Space On Earth And That We Survive In That Wilderness That Can Take Back What It Has Given, As Easily As Blowing Its Breath On Us Or Sending The Sea To Tell Us We Are Not So Big. When We Forget How Close The Wilderness Is In The Night, My Grandpa Said, Someday It Will Come In And Get Us, For We Will Have Forgotten How Terrible And Real It Can Be.

And I Saw Then And There You Take A Man Half-bad And A Women Half-bad And Put Their Two Good Halves Together And You Got One Human All Good To Share Between.

Trending Author

John Drinkwater

Giulio Andreotti

Category