15-year-old Ray Bradbury with Marlene Dietrich, 1935

“I was madly in love with Hollywood… I had been roller skating all over the town and was absolutely obsessed with getting autographs from all those glamorous stars. It was great. I saw really big MGM stars like Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Ronald Colman. Or I would hang out all day in front of Paramount or Columbia, then rush to the Brown Derby to look at the stars coming in or out of there. I saw Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen – everyone who’d been to the coast. Mae West appeared every Friday with her bodyguard. …I still have these autographs, and the wheels from the rollers also survived to these days. Almost all of those people I had met are already gone, but by some miracle Marlene and George survived. The light coming from these photos is like a repeated session of my life about a slightly stupid, but always loyal boy who terribly didn’t want to grow up.”

- Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 [ID in ALT]

1970 cover art by Richard Clifton-Dey for The Small Assassin, by Ray Bradbury

June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past.

Ray Bradbury, dandelion wine

Some people turn sad awfully young ... No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer, and ... get sadder younger than anyone else in the world.

– Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing."

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

-- Ray Bradbury

(Chambéry, France)

“I’ll hold on to the world tight some day. I’ve got one finger on it now; that’s a beginning.”

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

The children sensed, if they could not say, that fantasy, and its robot child science fiction, is not escape at all. But a circling round of reality to enchant it and make it behave.

- Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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.

-Ray Bradbury

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

Some people turn sad awfully young ... No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer, and ... get sadder younger than anyone else in the world.

– Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

*Originally published under the title "The Naming of Names"

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight - Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck - tonight you could almost taste time.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

It's gone away, it's gone back to the Deeps. It's learned you cant love anything too much in this world.

ray bradbury, the fog horn