Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Tiene que haber algo en los libros, cosas que no podemos imaginar para hacer que una mujer permanezca en una casa que arde. Ahí tiene que haber algo. Uno no se sacrifica por nada”.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

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 beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

…We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith...

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...

Not everyone born free and equal, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So!...

The crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We’re all sheep who have strayed at times. Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning, we’ve cried. They are never...

Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don’t know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if half an hour before, you...

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all...

You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

Good to evil seems evil a

Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

Every time you take a step, even when you don’t want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that’s good. Anything...

The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.

The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

There it is.”And he watched with now-gentle sorrow and now-quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance as all the bits and pieces of his house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily again.”The Happiness Machine,”...

Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.

When I look back now, I realize what a trial I must have been to my friends and relatives. It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. I...

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,...

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

That’s what I want, a mental evidence I can feel. I don’t want physical evidence, proof you have to go out and drag in. I want evidence that you can carry in your mind and...

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

How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing...

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...