American author (1920-2012)
God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.
RAY BRADBURY
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Science-fiction works hand-in-glove with the universe.
RAY BRADBURY
introduction, The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories
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
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
You don't question Providence. If you can't have the reality, a dream is just as good.
RAY BRADBURY
The Martian Chronicles
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
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
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
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
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
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
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'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
I laugh until I weep
And weep until I smile
RAY BRADBURY
"Christ, Old Student in a New School"
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