Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

Quotes

• If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

• All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset, I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.

• Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquence.

• 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.

• 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?

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

• We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

• 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 was one of Them: the Strange Ones. The Funny People. The Odd Tribes of autograph collectors and photographers. The Ones who waited through long days and nights, who used other people's dreams for their lives.

• You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

• I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.

• I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

• Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.

• Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

• Life is trying things to see if they work.

• Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.