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Who really said it

Jump Off the Cliff and Build Your Wings on the Way Down

Not Annie Dillard — actually Ray Bradbury Ray Bradbury 1920–2012 · American author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
Disputed In copyright

The cliff-and-wings image is Ray Bradbury’s, and he used it for decades: in a Los Angeles Times book review of 18 November 1979, in a 1986 keynote at UC Irvine, in an essay he wrote for Disney in 1988, and — closest to the wording people quote — in a New York Times News Service interview published 14 October 1990: “You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.” Annie Dillard’s name got attached in 2005, when a Brisbane newspaper reprinted almost that exact passage under her byline; in 2015 she wrote to Quote Investigator ↗ to say plainly that she never said it or wrote it.

Last verified 8 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Jump Off the Cliff and Build Your Wings on the Way Down” is Ray Bradbury, not Annie Dillard. Bradbury used the image from a Los Angeles Times book review of 18 November 1979 onward; his closest wording appears in a New York Times News Service interview published 14 October 1990: "You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down." An Australian newspaper printed almost those exact words under Annie Dillard's name in July 2005; Dillard emailed Quote Investigator in October 2015: "I never said it, or wrote it." — Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Annie Dillard. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by the estate of Ray Bradbury, with the original publishers of the pieces quoted: the Los Angeles Times, and Joshua Odell Editions / Capra Press for Yestermorrow). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Ray Bradbury — American novelist, short-story writer & essayist. Theme: "Jump Off the Cliff and Build Your Wings on the Way Down". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Jump Off the Cliff and Build Your Wings on the Way Down". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the line actually comes from

Really by
Ray Bradbury
Earliest in the documented trail
Los Angeles Times book review, 18 November 1979
Closest wording
New York Times News Service interview, 14 October 1990
Dillard’s own word on it
“I never said it, or wrote it.” — email to Quote Investigator, 10 October 2015

Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down. Ray Bradbury, October 1990

Bradbury’s answer in a New York Times News Service interview published 14 October 1990, in a passage arguing that pure intellect talks you out of love affairs, friendships and ventures. These are the words a Brisbane newspaper reprinted almost verbatim in 2005 — under Annie Dillard’s name (Quote Investigator ↗).

Book · borrowable scan
Yestermorrow (Joshua Odell Editions, 1991) at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: the full citation trail, 1979 to 2015

How the line travelled

  • November 1979 — the first citation in Quote Investigator’s trace ↗ is a Los Angeles Times book review by Bradbury himself, dated 18 November 1979, in which humanity marches from the rim of the cave to the edge of the cliff, flings itself off, and builds its wings on the way down.
  • 1986–1990 — he says it out loud and in his own prose: a keynote at a ‘Future Style’ symposium at UC Irvine, reported in the Los Angeles Times of 21 October 1986; an essay written for Disney’s Mickey Is Sixty! in 1988, later revised for his collection Yestermorrow (1991) ↗; and the New York Times News Service interview of 14 October 1990 — all documented and footnoted by QI ↗. Wikiquote ↗ adds a fourth phrasing, cited to the Brown Daily Herald of 24 March 1995.
  • November 1990 — an Associated Press condensation of that interview goes out over the wires, printed in the Trenton Evening Times of 27 November 1990 in slightly smoothed form: “You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down” (QI ↗). This wire version, not the interview itself, is the one that later surfaces under someone else’s name.
  • 2003 and 2005 — the line slips its moorings. A Charleston, South Carolina paper hands it to Kurt Vonnegut in August 2003; on 2 July 2005 The Courier Mail in Brisbane prints the AP wording — “jump off cliffs all the time” — under Annie Dillard’s name (QI ↗).
  • October 2015 — Dillard settles it herself, emailing Quote Investigator: “I never said it, or wrote it.” ↗ Her Wikiquote page ↗ carries no version of the line at all.
In copyright

Every documented wording of this line dates from 1979 or later — the Los Angeles Times review of November 1979, the 1988 Disney essay he revised for Yestermorrow (1991) ↗, and the October 1990 interview — so all of it sits well inside copyright in the United States. Nothing here is public domain; quote it as Bradbury’s, briefly and with attribution.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Who else gets the credit

This is a well-travelled line with three famous names on it and only one owner. Quote Investigator worked through the whole trail and, unusually, got a written answer from the author most often mis-credited.

Annie Dillard Denied by Dillard herself

The Courier Mail in Brisbane ran the passage under her name on 2 July 2005, in an article about taking risks; the words were those of the Associated Press condensation of Bradbury’s October 1990 interview, on the wires since that November. On 10 October 2015 Dillard emailed Quote Investigator directly — a message her literary agent confirmed later that month — to say she never said it and never wrote it (Quote Investigator ↗).

Kurt Vonnegut Unsupported

A Charleston, South Carolina paper printed “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down” over Vonnegut’s name on 21 August 2003. QI reports finding the adage in neither his writings nor his interviews (Quote Investigator ↗).

Franco Mancassola and Reid Hoffman Variants, not sources

An airline executive told the Sunday Times in January 1998 that he lived by the rule “jump out of the plane and build your wings on the way”; the LinkedIn co-founder’s entrepreneurship version — jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down — is the one that prompted QI’s investigation in 2012 (Quote Investigator ↗).

Nobody said it in quite these words Smoothed

The bare imperative — “Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down” — does not appear in that exact form in any of the Bradbury sources QI documents. In his own words it runs “You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time…” (the interview of 14 October 1990) and “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down” (Wikiquote ↗, citing the Brown Daily Herald, 24 March 1995). A 1988 sales book — Larry Wilson’s Changing the Game: The New Way to Sell, p. 156 — attributes to him “First you jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down”, an ascription QI records but does not trace to any Bradbury text or interview. QI notes he phrased the sentiment in more than one way; the slogan is a tidying-up of several.

The image, and every documented wording of it, belongs to Ray Bradbury — in print from November 1979 and repeated in essays and interviews for the next two decades (Quote Investigator ↗). Annie Dillard’s only connection to it is a newspaper error she took the trouble to correct in writing.

Context

Why this one is worth getting right

Most misattributions die in the dark: the wrongly-credited author is long gone, or never notices, and the line keeps circulating. This one is different. Annie Dillard is alive, read the research, and wrote to the researcher — and her denial now sits in the footnotes of the very page that traces the quote. That is about as close to settled as quote provenance ever gets.

It is also a clean case study in how these things happen. There is no clever forgery here and no malice: a Brisbane feature writer’s 2005 column simply carried the passage under Dillard’s name, and the wording it used tracks the Associated Press condensation of Bradbury’s 1990 interview that had been in circulation since that November. How the name got swapped, nobody has established. Once a quotation appears in a newspaper with a Pulitzer winner’s name attached, it is effectively laundered, and it circulates for years on that authority alone.

Dillard did not merely fail to say it. She wrote to the researchers to say so.

A note on the wording

Bradbury was a talker, not a slogan-writer, and he never fixed this thought in a single sentence. The version most reproduced on posters and mugs — the bare imperative — is a compression of at least four different phrasings he used between 1979 and 1995. If you want a wording you can actually cite, use the October 1990 interview or the Disney essay he revised for Yestermorrow (1991) — both are Bradbury’s own. The version that circulates from a 1988 sales book is a secondhand ascription, not a Bradbury text.

The Vonnegut version, with “developing” rather than “building” the wings, is a separate branch of the same drift. It has been circulating since at least 2003, and Quote Investigator found no trace of it in anything Vonnegut wrote or said.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Courage Creativity Hope

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: Jump Off the Cliff and Build Your Wings on the Way Downquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive trace, footnoted citation by citation from the 1979 Los Angeles Times review to Dillard’s own 2015 denial.
Wikiquote: Ray Bradburyen.wikiquote.org

Carries a sourced fourth phrasing, cited to the Brown Daily Herald of 24 March 1995, plus a first-person version from a 2010 CNN interview.
Wikiquote: Annie Dillarden.wikiquote.org

The negative check: her page carries no version of the cliff-and-wings line, and has no misattributed section at all.
Ray Bradbury, Yestermorrow (1991)archive.org

The Joshua Odell Editions collection that carries a revised version of his 1988 Disney essay, in which he uses the image in his own prose.
Ray Bradburyen.wikipedia.org

Biography and life dates for the author the line actually belongs to (1920–2012).
Annie Dillarden.wikipedia.org

Biography of the mis-credited author: born 1945, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

The real author

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

1920–2012 · American novelist, short-story writer & essayist

Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and spent six decades arguing that imagination is a practical faculty rather than a decorative one. The cliff-and-wings image was one of his standing metaphors for that argument: he put it in a book review, a university keynote, an essay for Disney and more than one interview. He never fixed it as a single sentence — which is precisely why so many slightly different versions, and so many wrong names, are in circulation.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this

Ray Bradbury, quoted in Luaine Lee, “Learning Is Solitary Pursuit for Bradbury,” New York Times News Service, Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC), 14 October 1990, C1. The earliest citation in Quote Investigator’s trace is Bradbury’s own Los Angeles Times book review of 18 November 1979.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Jump Off the Cliff and Build Your Wings on the Way Down’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/jump-off-the-cliff-and-build-your-wings-on-the-way-down/

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