American author (1920-2012)
I wonder ... if Mars is hell? Only waiting for our arrival before it bursts into brimstone and fire.
RAY BRADBURY
The Illustrated Man
Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.
RAY BRADBURY
introduction, The Circus of Dr. Lao
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 question Providence. If you can't have the reality, a dream is just as good.
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
One day Earth will be as Mars is today. This will sober us. It's an object lesson in civilizations.
RAY BRADBURY
The Martian Chronicles
I am the dreamer and the doer
I the hearer and the knower
I the giver and the taker
I the sword and the wound of sword.
If this be true, then let sword fall free from hand.
I embrace myself.
I laugh until I weep
And weep until I smile ...
RAY BRADBURY
Christ, Old Student in a New School
You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, "Ray Bradbury: A Visionary Who Couldn't Embrace the Digital Age", Mashable, June 6, 2012
I laugh until I weep
And weep until I smile
RAY BRADBURY
"Christ, Old Student in a New School"
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.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction
A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time ... I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me.
RAY BRADBURY
Long After Midnight
The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.
RAY BRADBURY
Salon.com, August 29, 2001
We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, CNN: Living, August 2, 2010