To celebrate the life of Ray Bradbury I have compiled a short list of inspirational and wise quotes from the legendary author.
How to live life
“If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.”
“Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.”
“Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.”
“Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world.”
“We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.”
Writing and creativity
“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.”
“Writing’s the exquisite joy and madness of my life.”
“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.”
“All that stuff that’s collected up in my head — poetry and mythology and comic strips and science fiction magazines — comes out in my stories. So you get to a certain age and you’re like a pomegranate, you just burst. And the ideas spill out.”
“My stories run up and bite me in the leg — I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.”
“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
Reading
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
“No use going to class unless you go to the library.”
MICHAEL WILSON
