Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true – hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.

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.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

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.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don’t do that.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.

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.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

Why go to a machine when you could go to a human being?

I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money.

If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.

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

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

Everything is generated through your own will power.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

The Internet is a big distraction.

The important thing is to be in love with something.

You fail only if you stop writing.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.

I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

We’re all dreamers.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

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?

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

Fahrenheit 451′ postulates a lot of things I didn’t want to have happen.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

f an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‘Do this, do that,’ but it’s my demon who provokes m

You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

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

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

The major networks, the cable networks, they’re being prosecutors. They’re judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c’mon, that’s ridiculous. But they’re doing it.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

First grade is very cheap. It’s the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don’t do it right.

You don’t have to turn on the TV set. You don’t have to work on the Internet. It’s up to you.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

I don’t need to be vindicated, and I don’t want attention.

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.

We’ve gotta reinvest in space travel. We should’ve never left the moon.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

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?

My business is to prevent the future.

My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We’re all god.

If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me. I’d have killed myself.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

Libraries raised me.

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well.

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

I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.

All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn’t matter if you have a beautiful face or not.

Facts are not interesting to me.

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, ‘The Martian Chronicles.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

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

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

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

I think we’re doing a dreadful job of educating.

I don’t go around thinking I’m Ray Bradbury all the time.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

I don’t do research. I never have.

I got started as an actor when I was 12.

Look at the Chandra Levy case. It’s become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable networks, they’re being prosecutors. They’re judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c’mon, that’s ridiculous. But they’re doing it.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

I never ask anyone else’s opinion. They don’t count.

You pay a certain penalty for going your own way. A lot of people think you’re nuts, and you’re not as popular with girls as you should be.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

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

I don’t have a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

Electronic books are junk.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

If you’re embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn’t include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.

Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I’d like to spend more time with her.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian – I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.

It was a pleasure to burn.

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

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

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

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.

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.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t “try” to do things. You simply “must” do things.

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.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

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.

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?

Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, 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.

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

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

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.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.