Looking for the best and inspirational Ray Bradbury quotes?
Ray Bradbury, an American writer, and poet were one of the most celebrated authors of speculative fiction in the 20th century. He wrote in many genres but is best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
He was born on August 22, 1920, to a poor family. His father worked as a power station construction worker while his mother, a former schoolteacher, had been forced to take other jobs when she lost her teaching position. After dropping out of Los Angeles High School at the age of 16, Bradbury had spent much of his time reading and doodling during long afternoons in the library at the University of California. In a biographical essay on the author, Steven Spielberg described him as America’s “greatest living short story writer.”
It’s your turn to pursue your dreams, and that starts with checking out his most inspiring quotes.
45 Inspirational Ray Bradbury Quotes
1. “First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” ― Ray Bradbury
2. “You fail only if you stop writing.” ― Ray Bradbury
3. “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? – Ray Bradbury
4. “There was her face, like a summer peach, beautiful and warm, and the light of the candles reflected in her dark eyes. [He] held his breath. The entire world waited and held its breath.” ― Ray Bradbury
5. “Why is it, he said, one time, at the subway entrance, I feel I’ve known you so many years? – Ray Bradbury
6. “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.” ― Ray Bradbury
7. “Everything is generated through your own will power. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. This is a democracy. You go where you want to go and do what you want to do.” ― Ray Bradbury
8. “We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.” ― Ray Bradbury
9. “It doesn’t matter what you do…so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.” ― Ray Bradbury
10. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ― Ray Bradbury
11. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” ― Ray Bradbury
12. “Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.” ― Ray Bradbury
13. “Because I like you, she said, and I don’t want anything from you.” ― Ray Bradbury
14. “Touch a scientist and you touch a child.” ― Ray Bradbury
15. “We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.” ― Ray Bradbury
16. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” ― Ray Bradbury
17. “The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.” ― Ray Bradbury
18. “You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.” ― Ray Bradbury
19. “Through lack of education, we’re not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.” ― Ray Bradbury
20. “If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.” ― Ray Bradbury
21. “I believe in creative failing – to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you’ve got a thousand poems behind you and you’re relaxed and you finally write a good poem.” ― Ray Bradbury
22. “If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.” ― Ray Bradbury
23. “Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.” ― Ray Bradbury
24. “How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.” ― Ray Bradbury
25. “Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.” ― Ray Bradbury
26. “There’s no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.” ― Ray Bradbury
27. “Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.” ― Ray Bradbury
28. “Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.” ― Ray Bradbury
29. “It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.” ― Ray Bradbury
30. “I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.” ― Ray Bradbury
31. “So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.” ― Ray Bradbury
32. “If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.” ― Ray Bradbury
33. “Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day..” ― Ray Bradbury
34. “I’ll hold on to the world tight some day. I’ve got one finger on it now; that’s a beginning.” ― Ray Bradbury
35. “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.” ― Ray Bradbury
36. “Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.” ― Ray Bradbury
37. “You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.” ― Ray Bradbury
38. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities.” ― Ray Bradbury
39. “Fantasies are things that can’t happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.” ― Ray Bradbury
40. “The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.” ― Ray Bradbury
41. “Everything that happens before Death is what counts.” ― Ray Bradbury
42. “We are anthill men upon an anthill world.” ― Ray Bradbury
43. “Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.” ― Ray Bradbury
44. “Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don’t do that.” ― Ray Bradbury
45. “Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.” ― Ray Bradbury
