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You'll Be Found, Your Nickels, Dimes And Indian-heads Fused By Electroplating. Abe Lincolns Melted Into Miss Columbias, Eagles Plucked Raw On The Backs Of Quarters, All Run To Quicksilver In Your Jeans. More! Any Boy Hit By Lightning, Lift His Lid And There On His Eyeball, Pretty As The Lord's Prayer On A Pin, Find The Last Scene The Boy Ever Saw! A Box-brownie Photo, By God, Of That Fire Climbing Down The Sky To Blow You Like A Penny Whistle, Suck Your Soul Back Up Along The Bright Stair!

-Ray Bradbury

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You'll Be Found, Your

Ray Bradbury

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You'll Be Found, Your Nickels, Dimes And Indian-heads Fused By Electroplating. Abe Lincolns Melted Into Miss Columbias, Eagles Plucked Raw On The Backs Of Quarters, All Run To Quicksilver In Your Jeans. More! Any Boy Hit By Lightning, Lift His Lid And There On His Eyeball, Pretty As The Lord's Prayer On A Pin, Find The Last Scene The Boy Ever Saw! A Box-brownie Photo, By God, Of That Fire Climbing Down The Sky To Blow You Like A Penny Whistle, Suck Your Soul Back Up Along The Bright Stair!

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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.

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

[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.

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

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

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.

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

A Science Fiction Story Is Just An Attempt To Solve A Problem That Exists In The World, Sometimes A Moral Problem, Sometimes A Physical Or Social Or Theological Problem.

Fiction Stories

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.

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 Trying To Predict The Future. I'm Just Trying To Prevent It.

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.

Hollywood Was A Good Influence Because I Was Madly In Love With Films, And The Films Had A Direct Influence On Me.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

What Should I Do?" "throw Up In Your Typewriter Every Morning." "yeah." "clean Up Every Noon.

A Day Without Writing Was A Little Death.

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!

Journalism Keeps You Planted In The Earth.

Life Shoould Be Touched, Not Strangled. You've Got To Relax, Let It Happen At Times, And At Other Move Forward With It.

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

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.

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

How Many Times Can A Man Go Down And Still Be Alive?

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.

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've Always Known That The Quality Of Love Was The Mind, Even Though The Body Sometimes Refuses This Knowledge. The Body Lives For Itself. It Lives Only To Feed And Wait For The Night. It's Essentially Nocturnal. But What Of The Mind Which Is Born Of The Sun, William, And Must Spend Thousands Of Hours Of A Lifetime Awake And Aware? Can You Balance Off The Body, That Pitiful, Selfish Thing Of Night Against A Whole Lifetime Of Sun And Intellect? I Don't Know.

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

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.

You Fail Only If You Stop Writing.

Inspiration To Write

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.

Way Out In The Country Tonight He Could Smell The Pumpkins Ripening Toward The Knife And The Triangle Eye And The Singeing Candle.

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

There Are A Lot Of Wonderful Women Writers Who Would Be Good Influences On Writers. You've Got To Spread Yourself Out And Educate Yourself With All Kinds Of Stories.

Living At Risk Is Jumping Off The Cliff And Building Your Wings On The Way Down.

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

We're All Watching Each Other, So There's No Chance For Censorship. The Main Problem Is The Idiot Tv. If You Watch Local News, Your Head Will Turn To Mush.

Don’t Think. Thinking Is The Enemy Of Creativity.

You Grow Ravenous. You Run Fevers. You Know Exhilarations. You Can't Sleep At Night, Because Your Beast-creature Ideas Want Out And Turn You In Your Bed. It Is A Grand Way To Live.

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

You've Got To Love Libraries. You've Got To Love Books. You've Got To Love Poetry. You've Got To Love Everything About Literature. Then, You Can Pick The One Thing You Love Most And Write About It.

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?

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.

Memory Is An Illusion, Nothing More. It Is A Fire That Needs Constant Tending.

I'm Inclined To Believe You Need The Psychiatrist.

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.

I'm Not Really Dying Today. No Person Ever Died That Had A Family. I'll Be Around A Long Time. A Thousand Years From Now, A Whole Township Of My Offspring Will Be Biting Sour Apples In The Gumwood Shade.

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

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

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.

I Don't Need An Alarm Clock. My Ideas Wake Me.

I'll Be Darned!" Said Douglas. "i Never Thought Of That. That's Brilliant! It's True. Old People Never Were Children!" "and It's Kind Of Sad," Said Tom, Sitting Still."there's Nothing We Can Do To Help Them.

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.

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

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.

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

Once The Automobile Appeared You Could Have Predicted That It Would Destroy As Many People As It Did.

I've Never Worked A Day In My Life. The Joy Of Writing Has Propelled Me From Day To Day And Year To Year. I Want You To Envy Me, My Joy. Get Out Of Here Tonight And Say: 'am I Being Joyful?' And If You've Got A Writer's Block, You Can Cure It This Evening By Stopping Whatever You're Writing And Doing Something Else. You Picked The Wrong Subject.

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.

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.

Don’t Let People Interfere With You. Boot ’em Out, Turn Off The Phone, Hide Away, Get It Done. If You Carry A Short Story Over To The Next Day You May Overnight Intellectualize Something About It And Try To Make It Too Fancy, Try To Please Someone.

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.

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

I Did What Most Writers Do At Their Beginnings: Emulated My Elders, Imitated My Peers, Thus Turning Away From Any Possibility Of Discovering Truths Beneath My Skin And Behind My Eye.

If God Treats You Well By Teaching You A Disastrous Lesson, You Never Forget It.

Writing Is Like Sex. You Have To Save Your Love For The Love Object. If You Go Around Spouting About Your Idea, There'll Be No "charge" Left. You Can't Father Children That Way.

Joy Is The Grace We Say To God.

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

No," Said A Voice, "the Only Thing Wrong On A Night Like That Is That There Is A World And You Must Come Back To It.

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

I Never Went To College, So I Went To The Library.

Everything That Happens Before Death Is What Counts.

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

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

Space Travel Is Life-enhancing, And Anything That's Life-enhancing Is Worth Doing. It Makes You Want To Live Forever.

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.

Notoriety And A Fat Bank Balance Must Come After Everything Else Is Finished And Done.

Reading Is At The Center Of Our Lives. The Library Is Our Brain. Without The Library, You Have No Civilization.

Those Women Like To See Their Tongues Dance.

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

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.

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!

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

Sandwich Outdoors Isn’t A Sandwich Anymore. Tastes Different Than Indoors, Notice? Got More Spice. Tastes Like Mint And Pinesap. Does Wonders For The Appetite.

It Could Reach Up And Grab The Moon.

Work Is The Only Answer. I Have Three Rules To Live By. One, Get Your Work Done. If That Doesn't Work, Shut Up And Drink Your Gin. And When All Else Fails, Run Like Hell!

Rules To Live By

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

Write What You Love And Love What You Write.

Doing What You Love

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.

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!

Don't Talk About It; Write.

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.

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.

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

We Need Not To Be Let Alone. We Need To Be Really Bothered Once In A While. How Long Is It Since You Were Really Bothered? About Something Important, About Something Real?

You've Been Put On The World To Love The Act Of Being Alive.

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

Why Is It," He Said, One Time, At The Subway Entrance, "i Feel I've Known You So Many Years?" "because I Like You," She Said, "and I Don't Want Anything From You.

Everyone Has A Telephone. Whether They Can Afford It Or Not. It's One Of Those Things That People Have, Regardless Of Their Income.

Science Fiction Is The Most Important Literature In The History Of The World, Because It's The History Of Ideas, The History Of Our Civilization Birthing Itself. ...science Fiction Is Central To Everything We've Ever Done, And People Who Make Fun Of Science Fiction Writers Don't Know What They're Talking About.

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.

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.

Those Who Don't Build Must Burn.

Fahrenheit 451 Book

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.

The Most Improbable Tales Can Be Made Believable, If Your Reader, Through His Sense, Feels Certain That He Stands At The Middle Of Events.

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

Positive Thinking

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.

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

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

I Laugh Until I Weep And Weep Until I Smile

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.

There Are Two Races Of People -- Men And Women -- No Matter What Women's Libbers Would Have You Pretend. The Male Is Motivated By Toys And Science Because Men Are Born With No Purpose In The Universe Except To Procreate. There Is Lots Of Time To Kill Beyond That. They've Got To Find Work. Men Have No Inherent Center To Themselves Beyond Procreating. Women, However, Are Born With A Center. They Can Create The Universe, Mother It, Teach It, Nurture It. Men Read Science Fiction To Build The Future. Women Don't Need To Read It. They Are The Future.

I Love Writing, It's The Center Of My Life. If You Don't Love What You Do, You'd Better Find Something Else To Love. Otherwise, You Don't Have A Reason For Living.

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.

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.

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

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.

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder.

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.

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.

A Library Is All The University You Will Ever Need.

Self-consciousness Is The Enemy Of All Art, Be It Acting, Writing, Painting, Or Living Itself, Which Is The Greatest Art Of All.

No Person Ever Died That Had A Family.

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

Sometimes You Have Intuitive Insight About How You Think Things Are Going To Be, And You Write That. Other Times You Fantasize Completely, Which Has Nothing To Do With Predicting The Future.

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.

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

Exclamation Points

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.

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.

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

Impossible; For How Many People Did You Know Who Refracted Your Own Light To You?

His Flesh Took Paleness From His Bones.

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.

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

Chock Them So ... 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.

Action Is Hope. There Is No Hope Without Action.

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

Do You Know That Books Smell Like Nutmeg Or Some Spice From A Foreign Land? I Loved To Smell Them When I Was A Boy. Lord, There Were A Lot Of Lovely Books Once, Before We Let Them Go.

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.

I'm Not In Control Of My Muse. My Muse Does All The Work.

The Gift Of Life Is So Precious That We Should Feel An Obligation To Pay Back The Universe For The Gift Of Being Alive.

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.

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.

There Must Be Something In Books, Something We Can’t Imagine, To Make A Woman Stay In A Burning House; There Must Be Something There. You Don’t Stay For Nothing.

The Sun Burnt Every Day. It Burnt Time.

Fahrenheit 451 Book

I Spent Three Days A Week For 10 Years Educating Myself In The Public Library, And It's Better Than College. People Should Educate Themselves - You Can Get A Complete Education For No Money. At The End Of 10 Years, I Had Read Every Book In The Library And I'd Written A Thousand Stories.

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.

The First Thing A Writer Should Be Is - Excited. He Should Be A Thing Of Fevers And Enthusiasms. Without Such Vigor, He Might As Well Be Out Picking Peaches Or Digging Ditches; God Knows It'd Be Better For His Health.

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

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

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

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

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.

Savory...that's A Swell Word. And Basil And Betel. Capsicum. Curry. All Great. But Relish, Now, Relish With A Capital R. No Argument, That' The Best.

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.

We Have Our Arts So We Won't Die Of Truth.

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

Everything Is Generated Through Your Own Will Power.

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.

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.

Every Day Is Christmas Day To A Dog.

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.

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

If You Don't Want A Man Unhappy Politically, Don't Give Him Two Sides To A Question To Worry Him; Give Him One. Better Yet, Give Him None.

I Don’t Write Things To Benefit The World. If It Happens That They Do, Swell. I Didn’t Set Out To Do That. I Set Out To Have A Hell Of A Lot Of Fun.

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

It Doesn't Matter What You Do...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.

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.

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 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 Wake Up In The Morning And I Lie In Bed, And It's The Time I Call "the Theater Of Morning." All These Thoughts Run Around In My Head, Between My Ears When I'm Waking Up. It's Not A Dream State, But It's Not Completely Awake Either. So All These Metaphors Run Around And Then I Pick One And I Get Out Of Bed And I Do It. I'm Very Lucky.

Libraries Are Absolutely At The Center Of My Life. Since I Couldn't Afford To Go To College, I Attended The Library Three Or Four Days A Week From The Age Of Eighteen On, And Graduated From The Library When I Was Twenty-eight.

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.

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!

Sometimes I Think I Understand Everything. Then I Regain Consciousness

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

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

We Are The Miracle Of Force And Matter Making Itself Over Into Imagination And Will. Incredible. The Life Force Experimenting With Forms. You For One. Me For Another. The Universe Has Shouted Itself Alive. We Are One Of The Shouts.

The Important Thing Is To Be In Love With Something.

Important Things

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.

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.

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

Without The Library, You Have No Civilization.

I Was Never Young. Whoever I Was Then Is Dead. That's More Of Your Quills. I Don't Want A Hide Full, Thanks. I Have Always Figured That You Die Each Day And And Each Day Is A Is A Box, You See, All Numbered And Neat; But Never Go Back And Lift The Lids, Because You Have Died A Couple Thousand Times In Your Life, And That's A Lot Of Corpses, Each Dead A Different Way, Each With A Worse Expression. Each Of Those Days Is A Different You, Somebody You Don't Know Or Understand Or Want To Understand.

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

All Silence Is. All Emptiness. And Now: The Dawn.

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.

Can't You Recognize The Human In The Inhuman?

Martian Chronicles

Science And Religion Have To Go Hand In Hand With The Mystery, Because There's A Certain Point Beyond Which You Say, "there Are No Answers."

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

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.

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