Background Image

...

Once You Let Yourself Begin To Be Grown-up, You Face A World Full Of Problems You Can't Solve. The Politicians And Specialists - Adults, All - Have A Hard Enough Time Trying To Figure Out Where To Look. It Doesn't Have To Be That Way. The Greatest Solutions In Society Are Reached By Corporate Thinking, Ruled By A Motive To Either Make A Profit Or Go Out Of Business.

-Ray Bradbury

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Once You Let Yourself

Ray Bradbury

...

Once You Let Yourself Begin To Be Grown-up, You Face A World Full Of Problems You Can't Solve. The Politicians And Specialists - Adults, All - Have A Hard Enough Time Trying To Figure Out Where To Look. It Doesn't Have To Be That Way. The Greatest Solutions In Society Are Reached By Corporate Thinking, Ruled By A Motive To Either Make A Profit Or Go Out Of Business.

Views: 11

Topic

More From Ray Bradbury

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.

I Wonder How Many Men, Hiding Their Youngness, Rise As I Do, Saturday Mornings, Filled With The Hope That Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam And Daffy Duck Will Be There Waiting As Our One True Always And Forever Salvation?

Edgar Allen Poe Really Started Me When I Was 8. I Fell In Love With Everything Of His.

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.

You Don't Read In Your Own Field. You Read In That Field When You're Young, So That You Can Learn.

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.

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. They May Like Henry James, But What If You Don’t Want To Write Like Henry James? They May Like John Irving, For Instance, Who’s The Bore Of All Time. A Lot Of The People Whose Work They’ve Taught In The Schools For The Last Thirty Years, I Can’t Understand Why People Read Them And Why They Are Taught.

But Remember That The Captain Belongs To The Most Dangerous Enemy To Truth And Freedom, The Solid Unmoving Cattle Of The Majority

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

In Sum, Do Not Insult Me With The Beheadings, Finger Choppings Or The Lung-deflations You Plan For My Works. I Need My Head To Shake Or Nod, My Hand To Wave Or Make Into A Fist, My Lungs To Shout Or Whisper With. I Will Not Go Gently Onto A Shelf, Degutted, To Become A Non-book. All You Umpires, Back To The Bleachers. Referees, Hit The Showers. It's My Game. I Pitch, I Hit, I Catch. I Run The Bases. At Sunset I've Won Or Lost. At Sunrise, I'm Out Again, Giving It The Old Try. And No One Can Help Me. Not Even You.

Disbelief Is Catching. It Rubs Off On People.

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.

I Have Something To Fight For And Live For; That Makes Me A Better Killer. I've Got What Amounts To A Religion Now. It's Learning How To Breathe All Over Again. And How To Lie In The Sun Getting A Tan, Letting The Sun Work Into You. And How To Hear Music And How To Read A Book. What Does Your Civilization Offer?

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.

The Ability To Fantasize Is The Ability To Survive, And The Ability To Fantasize Is The Ability To Grow

First Grade Is Very Cheap. It's The Later Grades Where You Have To Spend A Lot Of Money If You Don't Do It Right.

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.

See The World. It's More Fantastic Than Any Dream.

What's The Point Of Having A Library Full Of Books You've Already Read?

We Are Anthill Men Upon An Anthill World.

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.

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

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

Sunsets Are Loved Because They Vanish. Flowers Are Loved Because They Go. The Dogs Of The Field And The Cats Of The Kitchen Are Loved Because Soon They Must Depart. These Are Not The Sole Reasons, But At The Heart Of Morning Welcomes And Afternoon Laughters Is The Promise Of Farewell. In The Gray Muzzle Of An Old Dog We See Goodbye. In The Tired Face Of An Old Friend We Read Long Journeys Beyond Returns.

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

How Working For The Wrong Motives Poisons Our Creativity And Warps Our Ideas Of Success And Failure.

Miraculously, Smoke Curled Out Of His Own Mouth, His Nose, His Ears, His Eyes, As If His Soul Had Been Extinguished Within His Lungs At The Very Moment The Sweet Pumpkin Gave Up Its Incensed Ghost.

Facts Quite Often, I Fear To Confess, Like Lawyers, Put Me To Sleep At Noon. Not Theories, However. Theories Are Invigorating And Tonic. Give Me An Ounce Of Fact And I Will Produce You A Ton Of Theory By Tea This Afternoon. That Is, After All, My Job.

Digression Is The Soul Of Wit. Take The Philosophic Asides Away From Dante, Milton Or Hamlet's Father's Ghost And What Stays Is Dry Bones.

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.

Long Before You Knew What Death Was You Were Wishing It On Someone Else.

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.

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

I Have Four Daughters And Eight Grandchildren. My Soul Lives On In Them. That's Immortality. That's The Only Immortality I Care About.

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.

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")

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.

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.

His Flesh Took Paleness From His Bones.

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.

I Don't Talk Things, Sir. I Talk The Meaning Of Things.

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.

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.

Action Is Hope. There Is No Hope Without Action.

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.

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

I'm Not Trying To Predict The Future. I'm Just Trying To Prevent It.

I Am A Dedicated Madman, And That Becomes Its Own Training. If You Can't Resist, If The Typewriter Is Like Candy To You, You Train Yourself For A Lifetime. Every Single Day Of Your Life, Some Wild New Thing To Be Done. You Write To Please Yourself. You Write For The Joy Of Writing. Then Your Public Reads You And It Begins To Gather Around Your Selling A Potato Peeler In An Alley, You Know. The Enthusiasm, The Joy Itself Draws Me. So That Means Every Day Of My Life I've Written. When The Joy Stops, I'll Stop Writing.

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

I Laugh Until I Weep And Weep Until I Smile

Teachers Are To Inspire; Librarians Are To Fulfill.

Love What You Do And Do What You Love.

I Don't Like To Go To Theaters, Because I Don't Like The Way Most People Behave In Theaters.

It's Poor Judgment', Said Grandpa 'to Call Anything By A Name. We Don't Know What A Hobgoblin Or A Vampire Or A Troll Is. Could Be Lots Of Things. You Can't Heave Them Into Categories With Labels And Say They'll Act One Way Or Another. That'd Be Silly. They're People. People Who Do Things. Yes, That's The Way To Put It. People Who *do* Things.

I Am A Child Of The Poisonous Wind That Copulated With The East River On An Oil-slick, Garbage Infested Midnight. I Turn About On My Own Parentage. I Inoculate Against Those Very Biles That Brought Me To Light. I Am A Serum Born Of Venoms. I Am The Antibody Of All Time. I Am The Cure. You Do Of The City, Do You Not? Manhattan Is Your Punisher, Let Me Be You Shield.

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder.

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

You Don't Have To Turn On The Tv Set. You Don't Have To Work On The Internet. It's Up To You.

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

It Was Only The Other Night Everything Was Fine And The Next Thing I Know Im Drowning. How Many Times Can A Man Go Down And Still Be Alive? I Can't Breathe

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.

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

Don't Think About Things, Just Do Them; Don't Predict Them, Just Make Them.

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

Heaven Is A House With Porch Lights.

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!

When I Was A Young Writer If You Went To A Party And Told Somebody You Were A Science-fiction Writer You Would Be Insulted. They Would Call You Flash Gordon All Evening, Or Buck Rogers.

Friendship Is An Island That You Retreat To And You All Fall On The Floor And Laugh At All The Other Ninnies That Don't Have Enough Brains To Have Your Good Taste.

Like Every Beginner, I Have Thought You Could Beat, Pummel And Thrash An Idea Into Existence. Under Such Treatment, Of Course, Any Decent Idea Folds Up Its Paws, Turns On Its Back, Fixes Its Eyes On Eternity, And Dies.

Creativity Is A Continual Surprise.

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.

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

The Father Hesitated Only A Moment. He Felt The Vague Pain In His Chest. If I Run, He Thought, What Will Happen? Is Death Important? No. Everything That Happens Before Death Is What Counts. And We've Done Fine Tonight. Even Death Can't Spoil It.

Comic Strips Introduced Me To Metaphors. They Are Pure Metaphor, So You Learn How To Tell A Story With Symbols, Which Is A Very Valuable Thing To Learn. And I Learned That From Motion Pictures, Too, And From Poetry. Poetry Is Mainly Metaphor. If It Doesn't Have A Metaphor, It Doesn't Work.

Joy Is The Grace We Say To God.

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.

That's The Great Secret Of Creativity. You Treat Ideas Like Cats: You Make Them Follow You.

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

Anything You Dream Is Fiction, And Anything You Accomplish Is Science, The Whole History Of Mankind Is Nothing But Science Fiction.

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

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

There Is Too Much Government Today. We've Got To Remember The Government Should Be By The People, Of The People, And For The People.

Kerosene," He Said, Because The Silence Had Lengthened, "is Nothing But Perfume To Me.

Somewhere In Him, A Shadow Turned Mournfully Over. You Had To Run With A Night Like This So The Sadness Could Not Hurt

Remember, Montag, We're The Happiness Boys. We Stand Against The Small Tide Of Those Who Want To Make Everyone Unhappy With Conflicting Theory And Thought.

God, Here And There, Makes Madness A Calling.

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.

In Your Reading, Find Books To Improve Your Color Sense, Your Sense Of Shape And Size In The World.

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.

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 Don't Have A Computer. A Computer's A Typewriter. I Already Have A Typewriter.

Find Out What Your Hero Or Heroine Wants, And When He Or She Wakes Up In The Morning, Just Follow Him Or Her All Day.

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.

The Greek Philosophies Teach Us That We Are A Combination Of Dark And Light, Good And Evil, And Murderer And Savior, Hmm? And Until We Know This Completely About Ourselves We Cannot Love Well, And We Cannot Forgive Ourselves.

And Some Days, He Went On, Were Days Of Hearing Every Trump And Trill Of The Universe. Some Days Were Good For Tasting And Some For Touching. And Some Days Were Good For All The Senses At Once. This Day Now, He Nodded, Smelled As If A Great And Nameless Orchard Had Grown Up Overnight Beyond The Hills To Fill The Entire Visible Land With Its Warm Freshness. The Air Felt Like Rain, But There Were No Clouds.

And They Were All, When Their Souls Grew Warm, Poets.

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.

My Passions Drive Me To The Typewriter Every Day Of My Life, And They Have Driven Me There Since I Was Twelve. So I Never Have To Worry About Schedules. Some New Thing Is Always Exploding In Me, And It Schedules Me, I Don’t Schedule It. It Says: Get To The Typewriter Right Now And Finish This.

Putting Out The Stars And Extinguishing The Sun.

Christ Is One Of The 'family' Now. I Often Wonder If God Recognizes His Own Son The Way We've Dressed Him Up, Or Is It Dressed Him Down? He's Regular Peppermint Stick Now, All Sugar Crystal And Saccharine - When He Isn't Making Veiled References To Certain Commercial Products That Ever Worshiper Absolutely Needs.

Any Man Who Can Take A Tv Wall Apart And Put It Back Together Again, And Most Men Can Nowadays, Is Happier Than Any Man Who Tries To Slide-rule, Measure, And Equate The Universe, Which Just Won't Be Measured Or Equated Without Making Man Feel Bestial And Lonely.

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

It Doesn't Matter What You Do, He Said, So Long As You Change Something From The Way It Was Before You Touched It Into Something That's Like You After You Take Your Hands Away. The Difference Between The Man Who Just Cuts Lawns And A Real Gardener Is In The Touching, He Said. The Lawn-cutter Might Just As Well Not Have Been There At All; The Gardener Will Be There A Lifetime.

I'll Hold On To The World Tight Some Day. I've Got One Finger On It Now; That's A Beginning.

And He Remembered Thinking Then That If She Died, He Was Certain He Wouldn't Cry. For It Would Be The Dying Face Of An Unknown, A Street Face, A Newspaper Image, And It Was Suddenly So Very Wrong That He Had Begun To Cry, Not At Death But At The Thought Of Not Crying At Death, A Silly Empty Man Near A Silly Empty Woman.

I Have Total Recall. I Remember Being Born. I Remember Being In The Womb, I Remember Being Inside. Coming Out Was Great.

A Book Is A Loaded Gun In The House Next Door...who Knows Who Might Be The Target Of The Well-read Man?

All You Umpires, Back To The Bleachers. Referees, Hit The Showers. It's My Game. I Pitch, I Hit, I Catch. I Run The Bases. At Sunset, I've Won Or Lost. At Sunrise, I'm Out Again, Giving It The Old Try.

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

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.

I Ate Them Like Salad, Books Were My Sandwich For Lunch, My Tiffin And Dinner And Midnight Munch. I Tore Out The Pages, Ate Them With Salt, Doused Them With Relish, Gnawed On The Bindings, Turned The Chapters With My Tongue! Books By The Dozen, The Score And The Billion. I Carried So Many Home I Was Hunchbacked For Years. Philosophy, Art History, Politics, Social Science, The Poem, The Essay, The Grandiose Play, You Name 'em, I Ate 'em.

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 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.

There Is More Than One Way To Burn A Book. And The World Is Full Of People Running About With Lit Matches.

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

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

I Wish You A Wrestling Match With Your Creative Muse That Will Last A Lifetime. ... I Wish Craziness And Foolishness And Madness Upon You. May You Live With Hysteria, And Out Of It Make Fine Stories - Science Fiction Or Otherwise. Which Finally Means, May You Be In Love Every Day For The Next 20,000 Days. And Out Of That Love, Remake A World.

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.

Don't Talk About It; Write.

...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.

It's Not Going To Do Any Good To Land On Mars If We're Stupid.

Books Are Flesh-and-blood Ideas And Cry Out, Silently, When Put To The Torch.

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

Ours Is A Culture And A Time Immensely Rich In Trash As It Is In Treasures.

Halloween. Sly Does It. Tiptoe Catspaws. Slide And Creep. But Why? What For? How? Who? When! Where Did It All Begin? 'you Don't Know, Do You?' Asks Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud Climbing Out Under The Pile Of Leaves Under The Halloween Tree. 'you Don't Really Know!'

Melt All The Guns, I Thought, Break The Knives, Burn The Guillotines-and The Malicious Will Still Write Letters That Kill.

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

I'm Inclined To Believe You Need The Psychiatrist.

People Try To Force Things. It's Disastrous. Just Leave Your Mind Alone. Your Intuition Knows What It Wants To Write, So Get Out Of The Way.

I Want Your Loves To Be Multiple. I Don't Want You To Be A Snob About Anything. Anything You Love, You Do It.

Don't They Get Afraid, Then?" "they Have A Religion For That.

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

I Don't See Myself As A Philosopher. That's Awfully Boring.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Science Fiction Is Really Sociological Studies Of The Future, Things That The Writer Believes Are Going To Happen By Putting Two And Two Together.

A Library Is All The University You Will Ever Need.

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.

What Can We Writers Learn From Lizards, Lift From Birds? In Quickness Is Truth. The Faster You Blurt, The More Swiftly You Write, The More Honest You Are. In Hesitation Is Thought. In Delay Comes The Effort For A Style, Instead Of Leaping Upon Truth Which Is The Only Style Worth Deadfalling Or Tiger-trapping.

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?

Programs Like 'jeopardy' And 'who Wants To Be A Millionaire' Are Ridiculous. They're The Stupidest Shows In History. They're Making Us Dumber. They Don't Give Us Information, They Give Us Facts, Factoids. You Don't Learn Who Napoleon Was And How He Was Motivated. You Learn What Year He Was Born, And When He Died. That's Useless.

There Was Always A Minority Afraid Of Something, And A Great Majority Afraid Of The Dark, Afraid Of The Future, Afraid Of The Past, Afraid Of The Present, Afraid Of Themselves And Shadows Of Themselves

... Bums On The Outside, Libraries Inside.

Cram Them Full Of Non-combustible Data, Chock Them So Damned Full Of 'facts' They Feel Stuffed, But Absolutely 'brilliant' With Information. Then They’ll Feel They’re Thinking, They’ll Get A Sense Of Motion Without Moving. And They’ll Be Happy, Because Facts Of That Sort Don’t Change. Don’t Give Them Any Slippery Stuff Like Philosophy Or Sociology To Tie Things Up With. That Way Lies Melancholy.

It Won't Work,' Mr. Bentley Continued, Sipping His Tea. 'no Matter How Hard You Try To Be What You Once Were, You Can Only Be What You Are Here And Now. Time Hypnotizes. When You're Nine, You Think You've Always Been Nine Years Old And Will Always Be. When You're Thirty, It Seems You've Always Been Balanced There On That Bright Rim Of Middle Life. And Then When You Turn Seventy, You Are Always And Forever Seventy. You're In The Present, You're Trapped In A Young Now Or An Old Now, But There Is No Other Now To Be Seen.

We Earth Men Have A Talent For Ruining Big, Beautiful Things. The Only Reason We Didn't Set Up Hot-dog Stands In The Midst Of The Egyptian Temple Of Karnak Is Because It Was Out Of The Way And Served No Large Commercial Purpose.

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

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.

Life Is About Trying Things To See If They Work.

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.

I Was Doing A Terrible Thing In Using The Very Books You Clung To, To Rebut You On Every Hand, On Every Point! 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.

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.

That's The Good Part Of Dying; When You've Nothing To Lose, You Run Any Risk You Want.

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.

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.

I'm Interested In Having Fun With Ideas, Throwing Them Up In The Air Like Confetti And Then Running Under Them.

The Real Fear Isn't Rejection, But That There Won't Be Enough Time In Your Life To Write All The Stories That You Have In You.

Too Many Of Us Have Lost The Passion And Emotion Of The Remarkable Things We-ve Done In Space. Let Us Not Tear Up The Future, But Rather Again Heed The Creative Metaphors That Render Space Travel A Religious Experience. When The Blast Of A Rocket Launch Slams You Against The Wall And All The Rust Is Shaken Off Your Body, You Will Hear The Great Shout Of The Universe And The Joyful Crying Of People Who Have Been Changed By What They-ve Seen.

These Are All Novels, All About People That Never Existed, The People That Read Them It Makes Them Unhappy With Their Own Lives. Makes Them Want To Live In Other Ways They Can Never Really Be.

They Whispered To Caesar That He Was Mortal, Then Sold Daggers At Half-price In The Grand March Sale.

The Years Go By. The Time, It Does Fly. Every Single Second Is A Moment In Time That Passes. And It Seems Like Nothing - But When You're Looking Back ... Well, It Amounts To Everything.

Your Intuition Knows What To Write, So Get Out Of The Way.

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

My Stories Are Warnings; They're Not Predictions. If They Were Predictions, I Wouldn't Do Them. Because Then I'd Be Part Of The Doom-ridden Psychology. But Every Time I Name A Problem, I Try To Give A Solution.

Write A Thousand Words A Day And In Three Years You'll Be A Writer!

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

When I Graduated From High School I Couldn't Go To College, So I Went To The Library 3 Days A Week For 10 Years.

Men Throw Huge Shadows On The Lawn, Don't They? Then, All Their Lives, They Try To Run To Fit The Shadows. But The Shadows Are Always Longer.

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.

For About 150 Days A Year In Venice, The Sun Doesn't Show Through The Mist Until Noon.

I Discovered Me In The Library. I Went To Find Me In The Library.

I Decided That Was The Greatest Idea I Had Ever Heard. I Started Writing Every Day. I Never Stopped.

I Think We're Doing A Dreadful Job Of Educating.

Maybe The Books Can Get Us Half Out Of The Cave. They Just Might Stop Us From Making The Same Damm Insane Mistakes!

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.

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

The Important Thing Is To Be In Love With Something.

Important Things

I Don't Write Science Fiction. I've Only Done One Science Fiction Book And That's Fahrenheit 451, Based On Reality. Science Fiction Is A Depiction Of The Real. Fantasy Is A Depiction Of The Unreal.

Why Then You're As Mad As Me. No, Madder. For I Distrust 'reality' And Its Moron Mother, The Universe, While You Fasten Your Innocence To Fallible Devices Which Pretend At Happy Endings.

The Critics Are Generally Wrong, Or They're Fifteen, Twenty Years Late. It's A Great Shame. They Miss Out On A Lot.

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.

Those Who Don't Build Must Burn.

Fahrenheit 451 Book

Life Should Be Touched, Not Strangled.

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.

All Education Is Self-discovery.

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

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

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

I Feel Like I’ve Been Saving Up A Lot Of Things, And I Don’t Know What.

Everything Of Mine Is Permeated With My Love Of Ideas-both Big And Small. It Doesn't Matter What It Is, As Long As It Grabs Me And Holds Me, Facinates Me. And Then I'll Run Out And Something About It... I Write For Fun.

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

For If We're Destroyed, The Knowledge Is Dead...we're Nothing More Than Dust Jackets For Books...so Many Pages To A Person.

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

I Prefer To See Myself As The Janus, The Two-faced God Who Is Half Pollyanna And Half Cassandra, Warning Of The Future And Perhaps Living Too Much In The Past - A Combination Of Both.

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.

Trending Author

Grover Cleveland

Category