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.
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’m not a science-fiction writer. I’ve only written one book that’s science fiction, and that’s Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.
There’s no reason to burn books if you don’t read them.
You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.
The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.
A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it.
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!
Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.
There is more than one way to burn a book.
Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.
I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.
It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.
So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.
Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.
I shall remain on Mars and read a book.
What’s the point of having a library full of books you’ve already read?
There is both joy and suffering on planet Earth because this beautiful world is a world of duality – a world of opposites. There is an opposite side to everything.
I like that you can open up any one of my books anywhere and immediately be lost. I just love them so much.
I don’t think any of my books tell the reader anything new. But they do remind, in a time that is strident and screeching about the limitations of this world and all the trouble we can get ourselves into.