Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live life as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories...

There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God's voice mingling among the crystal fires.

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth

The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...

How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.

Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

Are you happy?

He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.

The day Joe Pipkin was born all the Orange Crush and Nehi soda bottles in the world fizzed over; and joyful bees swarmed countrysides to sting maiden ladies.

Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in the winter cave.

Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.

Surprise is where creativity comes in.

Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

Don't they get afraid, then?""They have a religion for that.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.

Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush.

Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush

No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.

The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

So, with the feeling of a man who will die in the next hour for lack of air, he felt his way toward his open, separate, and therefore cold bed.

Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood.

You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead.

They say you retain knowledge even when you’re sleeping, if someone whispers in your ear.

The things you're lookingfor, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap willever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.