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

-Ray Bradbury

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You're Afraid Of Making

Ray Bradbury

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

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If Teachers And Grammar School Editors Find My Jawbreaker Sentences Shatter Their Mushmilk Teeth, Let Them Eat Stale Cake Dunked In Weak Tea Of Their Own Ungodly Manufacture.

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

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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.

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For John Was Running, And This Was Terrible. Because If You Ran, Time Ran. You Yelled And Screamed And Raced And Rolled And Tumbled And All Of A Sudden The Sun Was Gone And The Whistle Was Blowing And You Were On Your Long Way Home To Supper. When You Weren't Looking, The Sun Got Around Behind You! The Only Way To Keep Things Slow Was To Watch Everything And Do Nothing! You Could Stretch A Day To Three Days, Sure, Just By Watching!

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

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Writing Can Be Described In Two Verbs: Throw Up And Clean Up.

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

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I Felt A Bit Bookish, Cut Off From Life.

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

Monday Burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, Burn 'em To Ashes, Then Burn The Ashes. That's Our Official Slogan.

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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

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

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

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

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

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Mysteries Abound Where Most We Seek For Answers.

Science Is No More Than An Investigation Of A Miracle We Can Never Explain, And Art Is An Interpretation Of That Miracle.

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!

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.

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

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

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 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.

Action Is Hope. At The End Of Each Day, When You've Done Your Work, You Lie There And Think, Well, I'll Be Damned, I Did This Today. It Doesn't Matter How Good It Is, Or How Bad-you Did It. At The End Of The Week You'll Have A Certain Amount Of Accumulation. At The End Of A Year, You Look Back And Say, I'll Be Damned, It's Been A Good Year.

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.

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.

Putting Out The Stars And Extinguishing The Sun.

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.

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.

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A Day Without Writing Was A Little Death.

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

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

Television Is Very Dangerous. Because It Repeats And Repeats And Repeats Our Disasters, Instead Of Our Triumphs.

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

He Stood Breathing, And The More He Breathed The Land In, The More He Was Filled Up With All The Details Of The Land. He Was Not Empty. There Was More Than Enough Here To Fill Him. There Would Always Be More Than Enough.

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

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.

Beware The Autumn People

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.

There Is More Than One Way To Burn A Book.

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

You Can Make Yourself Happy Or Miserable - It's The Same Amount Of Effort.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

I Spent Three Days A Week For 10 Years Educating Myself In The Public Library, And It's Better Than College.

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.

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.

I Don't Like The Kind Of Writer Who's Out To Change The World And Beat Up On People For Their Own Good. Stalin Did That And Hitler Did That, And To Hell With Them.

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

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

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

You've Got To Jump Off Cliffs And Build Your Wings On The Way Down.

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

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

Live As If You'd Drop Dead In Ten Seconds.

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

Digression Is The Soul Of Wit.

The Merry-go-round Was Running, Yes, But... It Was Running Backward. The Small Calliope Inside The Carousel Machinery Rattle-snapped Its Nervous-stallion Shivering Drums, Clashed Its Harvest-moon Cymbals, Toothed Its Castanets, And Throatily Choked And Sobbed Its Reeds, Whistles, And Baroque Flutes.

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

(...) And Metaphors Like Cats Behind Your Smile, Each One Wound Up To Purr, Each One A Pride, Each One A Fine Gold Beast You've Hid Inside (...)

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

I Have Fun With Ideas; I Play With Them.

But Souls Can't Be Sold. They Can Only Be Lost And Never Found Again.

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

Forgive, I Hope You Won't Be Upset, But When I Was A Boy I Used To Look Up And See You Behind Your Desk, So Near But Far Away, And, How Can I Say This, I Used To Think That You Were Mrs. God, And That The Library Was A Whole World, And That No Matter What Part Of The World Or What People Or Thing I Wanted To See And Read, You'd Find And Give It To Me.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Martian Chronicles

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.

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.

I’m Alive. Thinking About It, Noticing It, Is New. You Do Things And Don’t Watch. Then All Of A Sudden You Look And See What You’re Doing And It’s The First Time, Really.

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.

Love Is Easy, And I Love Writing.

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.

We Travel, Initially, To Lose Ourselves, And We Travel, Next, To Find Ourselves. We Travel To Open Our Hearts And Eyes. And We Travel, In Essence, To Become Young Fools Again—to Slow Time Down And Get Taken In, And Fall In Love Once More.

Falling In Love

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

Heaven Is A House With Porch Lights.

We All Are Rich And Ignore The Buried Fact Of Accumulated Wisdom.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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")

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.

You Don't Have To Worry About The Future, You Don't Worry About The Past - You Just Explode.

Here At This Far Lost End Of The Continent, Where The Trail Wagons Had Stopped And The People With Them.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

I Don't Believe In Colleges And Universities.

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

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.

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