Ray Bradbury People Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you?

...I mean, you don't just love people, you must LOVE them with exclamation points.

This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well and good.

Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.

Here at this far lost end of the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with them....

The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.

Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.

I don't understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway. Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?

Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.

Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.

Beware the autumn people

I'll be darned!" said Douglas. "I never thought of that. That's brilliant! It's true. Old people never were children!" "And it's kind of sad," said Tom, sitting still."There's nothing we can do to help them.

But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going. Sometimes I even go to Fun parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what? People don't talk about anything.

People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.

From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?

Everyone has a telephone. Whether they can afford it or not. It's one of those things that people have, regardless of their income.

People try to force things. It's disastrous. Just leave your mind alone. Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.

If you love people you criticize them, and if you don't love them you don't criticize them, you let them go to hell, don't you? To help any kind of friendship, your marriage, your children, you criticize because you love.

I'm trying to teach people of all ages to, number one: how to criticize, how to offer creative analysis on top of that, how to try to build things in a new direction and how to compliment people when the thing gets done.

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.

The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it.... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane.... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.

I don't like to go to theaters, because I don't like the way most people behave in theaters.

Mars is empty now. Five hundred years from now, it'll be full of people.

I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it - and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything - so they never get anything.

The very first experiments with building rockets and firing them off were carried out by students at Cal Tech in 1937, '38 and '39. And later these people put together these jet propulsion labs in Pasadena and wound up sending aircraft and spacecraft to the moon. So it all began very primitively with love.

The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.

I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going.

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.

You learn to live with your crazy enthusiasms which nobody else shares, and then you find a few other nuts like yourself, and they're your friends for a lifetime. That's what friends are, the people who share your crazy outlook and protect you from the world, because nobody else is going to give a damn what you're doing, so you need a few other people like yourself.

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

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

Do you ever wonder if--well, if there are people living on the third planet?' 'The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.