American author (1920-2012)
There they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.
RAY BRADBURY
Rhodomagnetic Digest, May 1950
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.
RAY BRADBURY
The Paris Review, spring 2010
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
RAY BRADBURY
Zen in the Art of Writing
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.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Ray Bradbury: Uncensored!
Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Emily the Strange: Piece of Mind
Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.
RAY BRADBURY
"No News, or, What Killed the Dog?"
Mars is like that uncleaned closet we have neglected for millenniums. Sin has collected there like bric-a-brac. Mars is twice Earth's age and has had double the number of Saturday nights, liquor baths, and eye-poppings at women as naked as white seals. When we open that closet door, things will fall on us.
RAY BRADBURY
The Illustrated Man
Mars is opening up. It's a frontier now, like in the old days on Earth, out West, and in Alaska. Men are pouring up here. There's a couple thousand black Irish mechanics and miners and day laborers in First Town who need saving, because there're too many wicked women came with them, and too much ten-century-old Martian wine.
RAY BRADBURY
The Illustrated Man
I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it's really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricochet that enables you to have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and superintellectual.
RAY BRADBURY
The Paris Review, spring 2010
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.
RAY BRADBURY
Coda
Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
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.
RAY BRADBURY
Zen in the Art of Writing
The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Get Started in Writing a Novel
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.
RAY BRADBURY
The Halloween Tree
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.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
You know what Mars is? It's like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago--don't know if you ever had one--they called them kaleidoscopes, bits of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that's Mars. Enjoy it. Don't ask it to be nothing else but what it is.
RAY BRADBURY
The Martian Chronicles
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Book Savvy
The Viking Lander on Mars is a toy grown to large size, a metaphor of a dream; that dream of extending our will, our hand, our seeing eye to another world. It is not a machine, it is us.
RAY BRADBURY
Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures