Ray Bradbury Quotes

Acting is, to me now, artificial. Seeing people suffer is real. It couldn't be more real. Some people don't like to look at it in the face because it's painful. But if nobody does, then nothing gets done.

I don't think there was really a time when I have not been politically aware.

I had to make sure I kept an eye on the real world.

It's hard for us not to be involved with things. When you have so much information and you see so much need, there's too much going on for us not to get involved.

My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls.

I don't want to be bored; I don't want to be with someone I don't respect.

It's not actually OK to just be apathetic about anything.

We're at a point in history where everyone needs to pay attention to politics. Too much is at stake for us to be apathetic.

One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.

When you are here, you are here. When you are gone, you are gone. It isn't a problem to be gone, so long as you are really here when you're here.

Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.

You can't love what you don't know much about. You can't convince, stimulate, hold the attention, teach, if you don't know what you're talking about.

Attention without feeling is only a report.

The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That's all there ever is.

Most of the time, if you're not really paying attention, you're someplace else. So your child might say, "Daddy, I want this," and you might say, "Just a minute, I'm busy." Now that's no big deal-we all get busy, and kids frequently ask for attention. But over your child's entire youth, you may have an enormous number of such moments to be really, fully present, but because you thought you were busy, you didn't see the opportunities these moments presented. . . . People carry around an enormous amount of grief because they missed the little things.

There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.

Drama often obscures the real issues

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

If I can leave a single message with the younger generation, it is to lash yourself to the mast, like Ulysses if you must, to escape the siren calls of complacency and indifference.

The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.

Today's political climate does not allow the luxury of apathy.

At any moment in time, our reality is based on whatever we focus on.

In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.