Ray Bradbury

“Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone ? 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?”

“Touch a scientist and you touch a child.”

“Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.”

“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.”

“Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it.”

“You could see her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish - some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy, and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being nothing but colour and nothing else.”

“The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.”

“Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?”

“Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.”

“When I look back now, I realize what a trial I must have been to my friends and relatives. It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. I was always yelling and running somewhere, because I was afraid life was going to be over that very afternoon.”

“It is a subliminal thing. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.”

“Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.”

“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.”

“My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We're all god.”

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...”

“Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.”

“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.”

“There it is."And he watched with now-gentle sorrow and now-quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance as all the bits and pieces of his house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily again."The Happiness Machine," he said. "The Happiness Machine.”

“When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.”

“There's no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.”