Ray Bradbury

I find it amusing that I'm on the Internet now, because I've criticized it, but mainly I've criticized it on the basis of, 'What are you going to do with it?'

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.

Everything is generated through your own will power.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

I've been afraid of people playing their life away with too many toys.

When you're older you want to learn from other people.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action?

I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!

I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.