The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (TV Series)

Don Rickles/Ray Bradbury/Cheryl Ladd (1978)

Ray Bradbury: Self

Photos 

Quotes 

• Ray Bradbury : [on alien life]  Simply by arriving, maybe they'll teach us that we're five billion people with a single skin around us. And if they teach us only that, then the encounter will be worth everything.

• Ray Bradbury : If we believe infinity goes on forever, we should want to go on forever with it. We have a - we're very privileged to be alive in the universe; we represent the life force here.

• Don Rickles : How come the moon program is, like, in a downhill...

  Ray Bradbury : There's a failure of imagination, a failure of will - uh, which I don't understand; uh, our president doesn't seem to care about it, uh, which I'm very disappointed in. We need, this, uh, kind of idealism to help us rise above the problems we've had the last twenty years. We've done so many things incorrectly, and when we do a thing right, I should think we'd be celebrating it more.

• Ray Bradbury : The very first thing I wrote, when I was 12, was about landing on Mars. So it's kind of wonderful that I've grown up with what started as a huge love and a hobby, and I wind up, uh, doing a play, writing a book - and, uh, next year, here at NBC, by gosh, a 6-hour special mini-series on "The Martian Chronicles".

• Ray Bradbury : If strange creatures, in the last nine years, have landed on the moon - and they have - uh, then the other is possible, creatures coming the other way. If we're moving out into the universe, and we're going to be colonizing the moon in the next few years - we're going to be colonizing Mars.

• Ray Bradbury : There is life on Mars, and it is us! We are - we're gonna be the Martians from here on in. That, to me, is tremendously exciting.

• Johnny Carson : What would happen - as a science fiction writer - if you ever explored the possibility, if they find something else that is faster than the speed of light? Now, they say that's impossible.

  Ray Bradbury : Well, they said breaking the sound barrier was impossible, too.

• Ray Bradbury : [on potential contact with alien life]  It'll be like going into St. Peter's on a summer afternoon. That wonderful feeling you have of being in a cathedral like that. Or the ending of "Close Encounters"; what you really have is - is the flesh of God moving one way, right? And our flesh moving this way, and they make contact like the, uh, portrait of Adam and God on the Sistine ceiling, hm? That's a wonderful moment, when the electricity leaps back and forth. And I think we will burst apart with pride at being part of this universal experience. I don't think it will diminish us; it will make us excited, and want to live forever.