Millie? Does the White Clown love you?

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts.He was moving from an unreality that was frightening...

First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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.

Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room...

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband...

One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn...

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

The terrible tyranny of the majority.

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.

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock...

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.

I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. (“Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds”)

Are you happy?

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

and sleeping put an end to summer, 1928,

How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted your own light at you? People were more often – he searched for a simile, found one in...

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl’s face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small...

I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every...

[One, he observes, is as a corrupt executive in] A Sound of Thunder, … Thunderbirds.

Good to evil seems evil

It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever...

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

No, no, it’s not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and...

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....

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...

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in...

Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.

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...

I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin...

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

It doesn’t matter what you do…so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.

You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may...

Who are your friends? Do they believe in you? Or do they stunt your growth with ridicule and disbelief? If the latter, you haven’t friends. Go find some.

Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.

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

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.

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...

He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother’s house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him...

Fire is bright and fire is clean.

I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the East River on an oil-slick, garbage infested midnight. I turn about on my own parentage. I inoculate against those very biles that brought...

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing.

Work. Don’t Think. Relax.