Ray Quotes

A computer does not smell ... if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.

I think we're doing a dreadful job of educating.

Why go to a machine when you could go to a human being?

Joy is the grace we say to God.

With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.

The great thing about my life is that everything I've done is a result of what I was when I was 12 or 13.

I feel like I own all the kids in the world because, since I've never grown up myself, all my books are automatically for children.

We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.

Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.

My business is to prevent the future.

When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field.

If someone sends you a love letter you've got to answer back.

Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

Get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it.

I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

Chock them so ... full of "facts" they feel stuffed, but absolutely "brilliant" with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving.

He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out.

Don't they get afraid, then?" "They have a religion for that.

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again.

I started writing every day. I never stopped.

Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.

The library is the biggest cracker box factory in the world. The more you eat, the more you want.

But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.

When the wind is right, a faint odor of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.

I'll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags.

Good writers touch life often.

Kill two birds with one stone, feed the homeless to the hungry.

And the odd think in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said.

No use going to class unless you go to the library.

The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.

It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.

Here at this far lost end of the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with them.

Tell us again, for we forget, that work done without love is stillborn, mindless, and lost in the very hour of its deliverance.

I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

Far away, in the meadow, shadows flickered in the Mirror's Maze, as if parts of someone's life, yet unborn, were trapped there, waiting to be lived.

From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.

He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know Im drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe

You're insane!" "I won't argue that point.

I was only kicking down the Christmas tree to get the star on top.

And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over.

I don't see myself as a philosopher. That's awfully boring.

I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.

... bums on the outside, libraries inside.

I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible.

You let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting it, you relive it.