Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
Everyone has a telephone. Whether they can afford it or not. It's one of those things that people have, regardless of their income.
We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.
We can't live alone in any society. But the best way to help a society or group, is to be the best individual in it that we can be.
I feel like I own all the kids in the world because, since I've never grown up myself, all my books are automatically for children.
You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.
To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.
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.
He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.
Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, 'Do this, do that,' but it's my demon who provokes me.
Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.
The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.
Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen.
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.
I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.
So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.
In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
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.
Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'
To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes.
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.
Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.
When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field.
The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his sense, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events.
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.
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.
If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.
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.
It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.
I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.
You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!
Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."
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.
Are you happy?" she [Clarisse] said. "Am I what?" he [Montag] cried. But she was gone- running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.
Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.
We meet on the common ground of an uncommon age and share out our gifts of dark and light, good and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow.
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.
You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.
But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime. I know everything worth knowing about myself--" ~Something Wicked This Way Comes
With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.
You must never name the goal. You must never tell us the target you're hitting for. You must automatically go toward it without ever naming it.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon.
Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.
(...) And metaphors like cats behind your smile, Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride, Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)