Ray Bradbury Quotes

It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.

Who knew Lenny was an encyclopedia for useless information?

The brain may die, but my compulsion for useless trivia lives on.

I love adventure movies, I just love action adventure films. It's pure cinema and you go in and you're lost to it. To me, it's that challenge - I want to give an audience that ride, that entertainment.

There's no such thing as useless knowledge. You never know what doors it's going to open up for you.

No good play is a success; fine writing and high morals are useless on the stage. I have been scribbling twaddle for thirty-five years to suit the public taste, and I should know.

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment.

I want my work to always be hopeful, in the end. You're giving me two hours, and, in Shots Fired's case, 10 hours of your life. I don't want you to ever leave something I've done feeling worse than when you came in. I hope the work can be aspirational, and aspirational doesn't have to be corny at all.

Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. and the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

It's always great to do a movie that you find is entertaining, but also can give some sort of political or social message.

They used to give us a day-it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are.

If I put my mind to it, and I put the work in, I have no doubt I could do it (pitch 4-5 additional years), but I made a promise to the people who've supported me for so many years. It's time to give back to my family.

I remember when I was 5 or 6 years old, gospel music felt familiar, like I had heard it in the womb or something. A lot of those old gospel songs still give me that feeling, that it's older than time and there's actually music that can tap into a universal subconscious, or whatever word you want to put on it.

Give me a break - They say taxes are inevitable, like death. At least death doesn't come every year.

I'll impose upon you the same arrogance that was imposed on me, and on my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother's mother: all the way back to the first human born of another human being, whether he liked it or not. Probably, if he or she had been allowed to choose, he would have been frightened and answered: No, I don't want to be born. But no one asked their opinion, and so they were born and lived and died after giving birth to another human being who was not asked to choose, and that one did likewise, for millions of years, right down to us.

Everybody can draw, in my estimation. If you give a man 50 years, he'll come up with the Mona Lisa.

A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit.

[W]here other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.

Freudian therapists do a lot of listening and very little persuading, and that was one of the reasons I eventually gave up being an analyst. You had to be too passive and not speak up, and you couldn't give homework to clients. While I was still an analyst, I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit psychoanalysis after practicing it for six years.

It's too bad failures don't give seminars. Wouldn't that be valuable? If you meet a guy who has messed up his life for forty years, you've just got to say, 'John, if I bring my journal and promise to take good notes, would you spend a day with me?'

Obviously the best way to retain the most profit is to not give any of it away. That's something that you certainly learn through the years.

When I find research really rewarding is when one piece of information gives you an idea for a story. That's when it's great.

A lot of people have used the frog splash over the years. Every one else that used it is a four star frog splash, when RVD did it, it became a five star frog splash.

Ten years ago I also had a very difficult decision to make when we had (Carlo) Cudicini giving fantastic performances in Chelsea’s goal for many years. I had in my hands a 22-year-old goalkeeper I thought could be in Chelsea’s goals for years and years and years and this situation is quite similar.

Good fiction challenges us as much as it entertains and these days, we could do with both of these things.