“We Need Not To Be Let Alone. We Need To Be Really Bothered Once In A While. How Long Is It Since You

The Martian Chronicles (USA/UK, 1980).

from The October Game by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“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.”

— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine (Green Town, #1)

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” - Ray Bradbury

The Bookworm, Carl Spitzweg, 1850.

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.”

— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

From The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury’s 1949 sci-fi classic.

“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”

— Ray Bradbury

15-year-old Ray Bradbury with Marlene Dietrich, 1935

“I was madly in love with Hollywood… I had been roller skating all over the town and was absolutely obsessed with getting autographs from all those glamorous stars. It was great. I saw really big MGM stars like Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Ronald Colman. Or I would hang out all day in front of Paramount or Columbia, then rush to the Brown Derby to look at the stars coming in or out of there. I saw Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen – everyone who’d been to the coast. Mae West appeared every Friday with her bodyguard. …I still have these autographs, and the wheels from the rollers also survived to these days. Almost all of those people I had met are already gone, but by some miracle Marlene and George survived. The light coming from these photos is like a repeated session of my life about a slightly stupid, but always loyal boy who terribly didn’t want to grow up.”

- Ray Bradbury

*Originally published under the title "The Naming of Names"