Ray Bradbury's Reading List

"Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world."

"[Brackett] was my teacher. I imitated her, of course. She had those beautiful short stories in Planet Stories about John Stark, they were all Edgar Rice Burroughs par excellence. In other words, she could write better than Burroughs. She took the same sort of things he did: the fighting man of Mars, the gods of Mars, the Martian stories, but gave them that extra ambiance, style, and imagination."

"In The Grapes of Wrath , every other chapter is a description, a metaphor, prose poetry, it’s not plot…I subconsciously borrowed that structure from Steinbeck when I wrote The Martian Chronicles ."

"When the novella was first published in Time magazine, Bradbury and a couple of friends went to the printing plant to get copies straight off the press: “We carried them off to a bar that was still open, and we sat and read The Old Man and the Sea , and we talked about Papa and how much we loved him."

"I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry of the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit’s spout…I turned back to the start: ‘Call me Ishmael,’ and I was in love!"