Ray Bradbury Zitate

seite 12

„Lebe so, als würdest du in zehn Sekunden tot umfallen.“

„Sie müssen keine Bücher verbrennen, um eine Kultur zu zerstören. Lass die Leute einfach aufhören, diese zu lesen.“

„Ohne die Bibliothek gibt es keine Zivilisation.“

„Bleibe betrunken beim Schreiben, damit die Realität dich nicht vernichten kann.“

„Es gibt schlimmere Verbrechen als Bücher zu verbrennen. Eines von ihnen ist es, sie nicht zu lesen“

„Bücher sind Ideen aus Fleisch und Blut und schreien lautlos, wenn sie an die Fackel gelegt werden.“

„Spring - und lass dir auf dem Weg nach unten Flügel wachsen“

„Ich neige dazu zu glauben, dass Sie den Psychiater brauchen.“

„Niemand ist jemals gestorben, der eine Familie hatte.“

„Es war eine kleine Stadt an einem kleinen Fluß und einem kleinen See in einem kleinen Teil eines Staates im mittleren Westen.“

„Ich glaube nicht an den anthropomorphen Gott.“

„Man kann die Leute nicht zum Zuhören bringen.“

„Sag mir nicht, wie ich meinen Roman schreiben soll. Sag mir nicht, dass du ein besseres Ende dafür hast. Ich habe keine Zeit dafür.“

„Drei Dinge sind in Ihrem Kopf: Erstens alles, was Sie vom Tag Ihrer Geburt bis jetzt erlebt haben.“

„Nachdem ich Sie gründlich verwirrt habe, lassen Sie mich innehalten, um Ihren eigenen bestürzten Schrei zu hören.“

„Die Retter Gottes feiern das Leben in der Welt.“

„Bibliotheken haben mich großgezogen.“

“We all love toys. I'm toy oriented. I write about toys. I've got a lot of toys. Hundreds of things. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative. … People are talking about the Internet as a creative tool for writers. I say, "B. S. Stay away from that. Stop talking to people around the world and get your work done."”

“As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn’t quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.”

“The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.”

“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.”

“There they go, off to Venus, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.”

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet."”

“Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.”

“There is no reason to write pornography when your own sex life is good. Why waste time writing about it?”

“When I was 16, I saw six people die horribly in an accident. I walked home holding on to walls and trees. It took me months to begin to function again. So I don't drive. But whether I drive or not is irrelevant. The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society — cars kill more than wars do. More than 50,000 people will die this year because of them and nobody seems to notice.”

“We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.”

“The telephone rang like a spoiled brat.”

“I knew I was going into one of the arts: I was drawing, acting, and writing.”

“On my seventieth birthday, when I reflected that so many of my friends were dead or dying, it hit me that it was high time I got more work done. Ever since that time, I have done the active, smart thing by increasing my productivity. I'm not on the rocks or shoals yet, but the last few years have been a devastation of illnesses and deaths of many good friends. [Star Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry was a loss that deeply grieved me.”

“If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.”

““War!”
The thought stood in Sim’s brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.
But why? Wasn’t life short enough without fighting and killing?”

“If you're reluctant to weep, you won't live a full and complete life.”

“My job is to help you fall in love.”

“The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.”

“The problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.”

“Summertime, 1950, I recognized Isherwood browsing in a Santa Monica bookstore. My book had just come out, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf, signed it and gave it to him. His face fell and my heart sank, but two days later he called and said, "Do you know what you've done?" I asked, "What?" And he simply told me to read his review in the Times. His rave turned my life around; the book immediately made the best-seller lists and has been in print ever since.
He was very kind in introducing me to various people he thought I should know, like Aldous Huxley, who had been my literary hero since Brave New World came out.”

“In touch! There’s a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices.”

“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.”

“I’ve done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done to me. I took the bottom out of her life.”

“Montag, you're looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the "guilty," but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.”

“The monster cried out at the tower. The foghorn blew. The monster roared again. The foghorn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth, and the sound that came from it was the sound of the foghorn itself.”

“For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles -- breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.”

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

“We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.”

“I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don’t publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don’t you have a novel?”