Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.
— Ray Bradbury
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.
If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.
You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do - and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time.
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.
All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.
We've got to dumb America up again.
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.
Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.
I find it amusing that I'm on the Internet now, because I've criticized it, but mainly I've criticized it on the basis of, 'What are you going to do with it?'
I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.
If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.
Burroughs is crap. Crap.
I don't need to be vindicated, and I don't want attention.
If I'd found out that Norman Mailer liked me. I'd have killed myself.
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.
Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that.
First grade is very cheap. It's the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don't do it right.
Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores.
When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.
I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.
I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I took pictures of Myrna Loy and Joel McCrea in front of the studios. I loved Hollywood. I have 500 autographs and 500 photographs I took.
If you're embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn't include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.
When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn't exist. TV didn't exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.
If you are going to describe the history of animation, you'd look at the early Disney work, then 'Bugs Bunny,' 'Road Runner' and other Warner Brothers theatrical productions. But when you got to 'Rocky and Bullwinkle,' you'd see they were unique: They assumed you had a brain in your head.
I don't go around thinking I'm Ray Bradbury all the time.
I've been afraid of people playing their life away with too many toys.
I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money.
You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.
I don't control my writing - it controls me.
I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count.
Electronic books are junk.
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.
There's no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.
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.
Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'
'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen.
My favorite writers have been those who've said things well.
I write screenplays in the middle of the night.
All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.
I'm not a futurist.
I got started as an actor when I was 12.
Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.
The Internet is a big distraction.
Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I'd like to spend more time with her.
I don't do research. I never have.
In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.
Books are alive, you see. They're not dead, they're alive.
If an idea isn't exciting, you shouldn't do it.
