Ray Quotes

I believe in Darwin and God together.

You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.

How many times can a man go down and still be alive?

We've let too much time go by. We've been busy with war instead of being busy with peace. And that's what space travel is all about. It's all about peace and exploration and wonder and beauty.

Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle.

Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt

This was all he wanted now. Some signs that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time he needed to think all the things that must be thought.

What do you do, go around trying everything once?' he asked. 'Sometimes twice.

Those women like to see their tongues dance.

You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.

If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

Evil has only the power we give it.

When you're older you want to learn from other people.

You don't organize metaphors . . . you explode them.

God, here and there, makes madness a calling.

We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

We've got to reinvest in space travel. We should have never left the moon.

Sometimes you have intuitive insight about how you think things are going to be, and you write that. Other times you fantasize completely, which has nothing to do with predicting the future.

Mars is empty now. Five hundred years from now, it'll be full of people.

The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.

Friendship is an island that you retreat to and you all fall on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies that don't have enough brains to have your good taste.

The most dangerous thing you can do is know who you are.

All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.

You're peculiar, you're aggravating, yet you're easy to forgive. You say you're seventeen?..How odd. How strange. And my wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at times. I can't get over it.

I felt a bit bookish, cut off from life.

I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.

But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority

That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.

And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between.

When I finished [writing it], I was crying. I knew at long last, after ten years of trying, I had written something good.

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.

Each person was himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid, always alone. If I should scream, if I should call for help, would anyone hear would it even matter?

What are you up to now?" "I'm sill crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.

I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

He says I'm a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers.

Edgar Allen Poe really started me when I was 8. I fell in love with everything of his.

We should have stayed on the moon. We should have made moon the base, instead of building space stations, which are fragile and which fly apart.

I've been writing every day of my life for 65 years.

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.

We can't live alone in any society. But the best way to help a society or group, is to be the best individual in it that we can be.

There are a lot of wonderful women writers who would be good influences on writers. You've got to spread yourself out and educate yourself with all kinds of stories.

I love the musical form of books. It's a different way of doing things, it's very beautiful. You're able to sing things instead of saying them. So what the heck - why not do them?

I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can't do that on a computer.

I don't like to go to theaters, because I don't like the way most people behave in theaters.

I got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay, a big stack of bills that gets bigger each day.

I sing what I sing true. Each night I sing it the way I feel that night.

I don't sing a song unless I feel it. The song don't tug at my heart, I pass on it. I have to believe in what I'm doing.

I heard someone say that all black people got rhythm. Bullshit.