Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered...sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks.
I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.
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.
Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.
He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.
These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.
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.
Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.
Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.
My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We're all god.
We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.
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.
It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
My gosh, if you’re going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would’ve talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!
I don't decide. My secret self decides. I just go with my subconscious. If it wants to do a poem, I do a poem, and if it wants to do a play, I do a play. So I'm not in charge, I'm not in control.
Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.
I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.
You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.
In that film Love Story, there's a line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you're sorry every day for some little thing or other.
Go out and make your own speeches. People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, "Hey, we got a crazy man in the community," and they'll begin talking to you.
We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe. If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal.
They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.
All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It's my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset, I've won or lost. At sunrise, I'm out again, giving it the old try.
There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves
I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.
It's rare you get an idea from a dream. I can't really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I've ever had a dream that held up. They're much too dislocated
I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.
Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.
I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I'll be around a long time. A thousand years from now, a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade.
If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.
Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there was it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away.
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.
Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.
I'll be darned!" said Douglas. "I never thought of that. That's brilliant! It's true. Old people never were children!" "And it's kind of sad," said Tom, sitting still."There's nothing we can do to help them.
This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.
Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?
They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won't run on. They don't know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it'll have to hit.
The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.
Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
I was one of Them: the Strange Ones. The Funny People. The Odd Tribes of autograph collectors and photographers. The Ones who waited through long days and nights, who used other people's dreams for their lives.
My stories are warnings; they're not predictions. If they were predictions, I wouldn't do them. Because then I'd be part of the doom-ridden psychology. But every time I name a problem, I try to give a solution.
To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root - first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you've got the future secured.
The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.
I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.
I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?
[His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.