The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

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...

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

There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn’t matter what you...

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.

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings,...

Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.

Men are men, unfortunately, no matter what their shape, and inclined to sin.

There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children’s playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure,...

It doesn’t think anything we don’t want it to think.”That’s sad,’ said Montag, quietly, ‘because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that’s all it can ever...

Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon. Not theories, however. Theories are invigorating and tonic. Give me an ounce of fact and I will produce you a...

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no...

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

The mosquitos were gone from the porch, and surely when they abandoned the conflict the war with Time was really done, there was nothing for it but that humans also forsake the battleground.

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...

And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling...

Surprise is where creativity comes in.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves — you can get a complete education for no money. At...

And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling gibbering manikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him.

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

Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.

I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes...

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

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

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.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s...

That’s all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things...

In ballet, any dancer who asks himself what step comes next must freeze. Any man who takes a sex manual to bed with him invites frigidity. Dancing, sex, writing a novel–all are a living process,...

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...

Well, I’ve kept you waiting long enough,” he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself.

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

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and...

Sunsets are loved because they vanish.Flowers are loved because they go.The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart.These are not the sole reasons, but at...

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

Libraries raised me.

He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that hardly seemed to be there. Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow...

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...

Fantasy? That’s for the Fire Birds. Fantasy, even when it takes science-fictional forms, which it often does, is dangerous. It is escapist. It is daydreaming. It has nothing to do with the world and the...

Ignorance is fatal.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall

Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

Look for the little loves. Find and shape the little bitternesses.

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,...