Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the...

He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in the darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make flesh that holds fast and binds eternity.

I’m being ironic. Don’t interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite. There!

It was a simple thing. All terror is a simplicity. (“Interval In Sunlight”)

I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well and good.

And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great...

Beer’s intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.

So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.

Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.

The sidewalks were haunted by dustghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up,swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice onthe lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strol-lers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed avolcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes every-where, crusting slumberless...

Why then you’re as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust ‘reality’ and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.

Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this...

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country...

My stories run up and bite me on the leg-I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows.What’s it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those 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.

He was still a kid inside. His body had grown, stretched, towered, tanned its skin, hardened its muscle, darkened its tawny shock of long hair, tightened its lines around jaw and eyes, thickened fingers and knuckles, but the brain didn’t feel as if it had grown in sympathy with the rest. It was still green,...

When Douglas walked, his mind ran, when he ran, his mind walked.

Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered…sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks…

You should’ve thought of that before becoming a fireman.””Thought!” he said. “Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can’t afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize...

You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

You fail only if you stop writing.

Jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It ‘ s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset, I ‘ ve won or lost. At sunrise, I ‘ m out again, giving it the old try.

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

She didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.

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...

The Mexican people, once they have happened on a good food, he thought, flay the thing to distraction. Ham and eggs every morning now for two weeks. Since arriving in Guanajuato, bearing his typewriter, it had been the same thing each morning at nine. He stared at his plate, gently grieved.(“The Candy Skull”)

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it’s just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and...

The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills. For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him…...

Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they’re not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it’s not that. It’s just, you know, seeing them pass, that’s how they’ll be all their life; they’ll get hit, hurt, cut,...

She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty...

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?

Silence. Montag sat like a carved white stone. The echo of the final hammer on his skull died slowly away into the black cavern where Faber waited for the echoes to subside. And then when the startled dust had settled down about Montag’s mind, Faber began, softly, “All right, he’s had his say. You must...

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.

My feet,” said Montag. “I can’t move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet won’t move!””Listen. Easy now,” said the old man gently. “I know, I know. You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me...

Creativity is a continual surprise.

That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can’t hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since...

Jump and let’s build our wings on the way down

But souls can’t be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.

Science fiction is the art of the possible not the impossible.

It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to drink, and we held the cold glasses in our hands, and Dad read the stereo-newspapers inserted into the special hat you put on your head and which turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three times in succession.

It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.

That’s life for you,” said MacDunn. “Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can’t hurt you no more.