The gentle, wise man who was Ray Bradbury--author of Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes; who wrote TV scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone and the script for the John Huston-directed adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; plus various short story collections, and whose books have sold more than eight million copies and been sold in 36 languages--left this mortal coil on June 5 at age 91. Lauded by the New York Times as "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream," Bradbury was a living, breathing reality check with little use for the dumbing down of society. Inspired to become a writer by a carnival magician named Mr. Electrico, he never lost his child-like sense of wonder at how the world works or a love of ideas he gained from reading widely in his youth. In fact, as the Times noted, childhood was the source of his inspiration: "he boasted that he total recall of his earliest years, including the moment of his birth. Readers had no reason to doubt him. As for the protagonists in his stories, no matter how far they journeyed from home, they learned they could never escape the past."

The Spring 2010 edition of Paris Review contained a fascinating interview with Bradbury, which was originally conducted in the 1970s but shelves for reasons unrecorded, before being updated with new questions. The following excerpts offer a glimpse at the qualities, sensibility and curiosity that made Ray Bradbury indispensable.

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Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?

Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn't been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time-developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species-have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they're fifteen, twenty years late. It's a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can't explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.

Does science fiction offer the writer an easier way to explore a conceptual premise?

Take Fahrenheit 451. You're dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. You've got to be careful you don't start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires-which is a grand idea in itself-and you start him on the adventure of discovering that maybe books shouldn't be burned. He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life. It's a great suspense story, and locked into it is this great truth you want to tell, without pontificating.

I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it's really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricochet that enables you to have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and superintellectual.

‘I’m the least scientific of all the people up on the platform here today’: Through the years Ray Bradbury attended several major space mission events at JPL/Caltech. On November 12, 1971, on the even of Mariner 9 going into orbit at Mars, Bradbury took part in a symposium at Caltech with Arthur C. Clarke, journalist Walter Sullivan, and scientists Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray. In addition to being consistently trés engage (he probably would have hated to be called such), Bradbury read his poem ‘If Only We Had Taller Been.’ This will only make you miss him more.

Do you read your science-fiction contemporaries?

I've always believed that you should do very little reading in your own field once you're into it. But at the start it's good to know what everyone's doing. When I was seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt--all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction--but my big science-fiction influences are H.?G. Wells and Jules Verne. I've found that I'm a lot like Verne--a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo--who in a way is the flip side of Melville's madman, Ahab--goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.

How early did you begin writing?

It started with Poe. I imitated him from the time I was twelve until I was about eighteen. I fell in love with the jewelry of Poe. He's a gem encruster, isn't he? Same with Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter. I was doing traditional horror stories, which I think everyone who goes into the field starts out with-you know, people getting locked in tombs. I drew Egyptian mazes.

Everything went into ferment that one year, 1932, when I was twelve. There was Poe, Carter, Burroughs, the comics. I listened to a lot of imaginative radio shows, especially one called Chandu the Magician. I'm sure it was quite junky, but not to me. Every night when the show went off the air I sat down and, from memory, wrote out the whole script. I couldn't help myself. Chandu was against all the villains of the world and so was I. He responded to a psychic summons and so did I.
I loved to illustrate, too, and I was a cartoonist. I always wanted my own comic strip. So I was not only writing about Tarzan, I was drawing my own Sunday panels. I did the usual adventure stories, located them in South America or among the Aztecs or in Africa. There was always the beautiful maiden and the sacrifice. So I knew I was going into one of the arts: I was drawing, acting, and writing.

‘When I was 12 years old I looked at the planet Mars and I said, ‘Take me home,’ and the planet Mars took me home and I never came back’: A short film for the National Endowment of the Arts features Ray Bradbury talking enthusiastically about the early influences on his literary sensibility, his love of books and libraries, and his acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 (‘we should learn from history about the destruction of books’).

On Thomas Wolfe as an influence:

He was a great romantic. When you're nineteen, he opens the doors of the world for you. We use certain authors at certain times of our lives, and we may never go back to them again. Wolfe is perfect when you're nineteen. If you fall in love with Shaw when you're thirty it's going to be a lifetime love. And I think that's true of certain books by Thomas Mann as well. I read Death in Venice when I was twenty, and it's gotten better every year since. Style is truth. Once you nail down what you want to say about yourself and your fears and your life, then that becomes your style and you go to those writers who can teach you how to use words to fit your truth. I learned from John Steinbeck how to write objectively and yet insert all of the insights without too much extra comment. I learned a hell of a lot from John Collier and Gerald Heard, and I fell madly in love with a number of women writers, especially Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. I still go back and reread Edith Wharton and Jessamyn West--The Friendly Persuasion is one of my favorite books of short stories.

On why his short stories were collected and became The Martin Chronicles, one of his most famous novels:

Around 1947, when I published my first novel, Dark Carnival, I met the secretary of Norman Corwin, a big name in radio-a director, writer, and producer. Through her I sent him a copy of Dark Carnival and wrote a letter saying, If you like this book as much as I like your work, I'd like to buy you drinks someday. A week later the phone rang and it was Norman. He said, You're not buying me drinks, I'm buying you dinner. That was the start of a lifelong friendship. That first time he took me to dinner I told him about my Martian story "Ylla." He said, Wow, that's great, write more of those. So I did. In a way, that was what caused The Martian Chronicles to be born.

There was another reason. In 1949, my wife Maggie became pregnant with our first daughter, Susan. Up until then, Maggie had worked full-time and I stayed home writing my short stories. But now that she was going to have the baby, I needed to earn more money. I needed a book contract. Norman suggested I travel to New York City to meet editors and make an impression, so I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don't publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don't you have a novel? I said, No, I don't. I'm a sprinter, not a marathon runner. I was ready to go home when, on my last night, I had dinner with an editor at Doubleday named Walter Bradbury-no relation. He said, Wouldn't there be a book if you took all those Martian stories and tied them together? You could call it The Martian Chronicles. It was his title, not mine. I said, Oh, my God. I had read Winesburg, Ohio when I was twenty-four years old, in 1944. I was so taken with it that I thought, Someday I'd like to write a book like this, but I'd set it on Mars. I'd actually made a note about this in 1944, but I'd forgotten about it.
I stayed up all night at the YMCA and typed out an outline. I took it to him the next morning. He read it and said, I'll give you a check for seven hundred and fifty bucks. I went back to Los Angeles and connected all the short stories and it became The Martian Chronicles. It's called a novel, but you're right, it's really a book of short stories all tied together.

From 1963, a half-hour television documentary about Ray Bradbury by David L. Wolper, ‘The Story of a Writer.’ It includes ‘Dial Double Zero,’ a Bradbury short story about intelligence within a telephone system.

Why he doesn't believe in going to college to learn to write:

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do-and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they've taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can't understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don't have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.

But your books are taught widely in schools.
 
Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I've been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there's a story. And that's what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I'm in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.

How important is it to you to follow your own instincts?

Oh, God. It's everything. I was offered the chance to write War and Peace for the screen a few decades ago. The American version with King Vidor directing. I turned it down. Everyone said, How could you do that? That's ridiculous, it's a great book! I said, Well, it isn't for me. I can't read it. I can't get through it, I tried. That doesn't mean the book's bad. I just am not prepared for it. It portrays a very special culture. The names throw me. My wife loved it. She read it once every three years for twenty years. They offered the usual amount for a screenplay like that, a hundred thousand dollars, but you cannot do things for money in this world. I don't care how much they offer you, and I don't care how poor you are. There's only one excuse ever to take money under those circumstances: If someone in your family is horribly ill and the doctor bills are piled up so high that you're all going to be destroyed. Then I'd say, Go on and take the job. Go do War and Peace and do a lousy job. And be sorry later.

Recalling the stroke he suffered in 1999:

I was out at my house in Palm Springs working on a short story. I was walking around the house and all of a sudden I felt unstable. I couldn't walk very well or talk very well. I called my wife-she was back at our home in Los Angeles-and she sent my driver out to get me. When he arrived I said, I want to go home, and he said, No, no. I'm taking you right to the hospital. So he saved my life. He took me to the Eisenhower Medical Center near Palm Springs and they ran tests and they saw that I was in a lousy condition. My leg was paralyzed, my arm was paralyzed, I found it difficult to speak.

I knew it was severe because I couldn't move. I'd lie in bed and say to my leg, OK, move-and it wouldn't. It was like a dead dog. Roll over, dead dog, roll over. And does your hand move? No. So after a period of weeks, finally, slowly, slowly, I got a finger to move, I got a toe to move. I thought I'd never get through the first month, but I did. And finally my leg began to come alive. God has been good to me. I've been given great genes and the whole experience was good for me because I've taken off all this weight. My blood sugar is normal now-I don't have to take medicines for that. My blood pressure is normal again after many years. I did all this to myself--I have no one else to blame. Lots of beer, lots of wine, overweight by seventy pounds, and it was time to take it off.

Ray Bradbury singles out points of interest in his office (1968)

On the importance of optimism in his career:

I don't believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That's a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don't know-you haven't done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother's table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you've done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I'll be damned, I did this today. It doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad-you did it. At the end of the week you'll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year.

On e-books and Amazon's Kindle:

Those aren't books. You can't hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn't do that for you. I'm sorry.

With the publication of Fahrenheit 451, you were hailed as a visionary. What would you warn us about today?

Our education system has gone to hell. It's my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we'd be set for the future, wouldn't we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is "Beauty and the Beast." That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too. By the time I was six years old, I had learned how to read and write.

We should forget about teaching children mathematics. They're not going to use it ever in their lives. Give them simple arithmetic-one plus one is two, and how to divide, and how to subtract. Those are simple things that can be taught quickly. But no mathematics because they are never going to use it, never in their lives, unless they are going to be scientists, and then they can simply learn it later. My brother, for example, didn't do well in school, but when he was in his twenties, he needed a job with the Bureau of Power and Light. He got a book about mathematics and electricity and he read it and educated himself and got the job. If you are bright, you will learn how to educate yourself with mathematics if you need it. But the average child never will. So it must be reading and writing. Those are the important things. And by the time children are six, they are completely educated and then they can educate themselves. The library will be the place where they grow up.

Ray Bradbury on his early struggles as a writer trying and failing to sell his short stories, until the breakthrough came…

On the secret of the longevity of his marriage, which lasted for 56 years before his wife passed away in 2003:

If you don't have a sense of humor, you don't have a marriage. In that film Love Story, there's a line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you're sorry every day for some little thing or other. You make a mistake. I forgot the lightbulbs. I didn't bring this from the store and I'm sorry. You know? So being able to accept responsibility, but above all having a sense of humor, so that anything that happens can have its amusing side.

The week after your wife passed away, you got back to writing. How were you able to do that?

Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!

On writing for an ideal reader or a particular audience:

Every time you write for anyone, regardless of who they are, no matter how right the cause you may believe in, you lie. Steinbeck is one of the few writers out of the thirties who's still read, because he didn't write for causes at all. He wrote human stories that happened to represent causes indirectly. The Grapes of Wrath and his other books are not political treatises. Fahrenheit 451 is in a way a political treatise, but it isn't, because all it is saying, emotionally, is: Everyone leave everyone else alone!

Does literature, then, have any social obligation?

Not a direct one. It has to be through reflection, through indirection. Nikos Kazantzakis says, "Live forever." That's his social obligation. The Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. All of Dickens says live life at the top of your energy. Edgar Rice Burroughs never would have looked upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it turns out-and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly--Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.

Ray Bradbury joins Dean Nelson of Point Loma Nazarene University for a talk about his craft as part of Point Loma Nazarene University's Writer's Symposium by the Sea Series, April 2001

Why do you think that?

By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special. That's what we have to do for everyone, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten, Hey, life is fun! Grow tall! I've talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs. I was once at Caltech with a whole bunch of scientists and they all admitted it. Two leading astronomers--one from Cornell, the other from Caltech--came out and said, Yeah, that's why we became astronomers. We wanted to see Mars more closely.
I find this in most fields. The need for romance is constant, and again, it's pooh-poohed by intellectuals. As a result they're going to stunt their kids. You can't kill a dream. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure, and romance. It's like my friend Mr. Electrico.

That's the character who makes a brief appearance in Something Wicked This Way Comes, right? And you've often spoken of a real-life Mr. Electrico, though no scholar has ever been able to confirm his existence. The story has taken on a kind of mythic stature-the director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies calls the search for Mr. Electrico the "Holy Grail" of Bradbury scholarship.

Yes, but he was a real man. That was his real name. Circuses and carnivals were always passing through Illinois during my childhood and I was in love with their mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was twelve years old, the Dill Brothers Combined Shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sat in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end.

The next day, I had to go the funeral of one of my favorite uncles. Driving back from the graveyard with my family, I looked down the hill toward the shoreline of Lake Michigan and I saw the tents and the flags of the carnival and I said to my father, Stop the car. He said, What do you mean? And I said, I have to get out. My father was furious with me. He expected me to stay with the family to mourn, but I got out of the car anyway and I ran down the hill toward the carnival.

It didn't occur to me at the time, but I was running away from death, wasn't I? I was running toward life. And there was Mr. Electrico sitting on the platform out in front of the carnival and I didn't know what to say. I was scared of making a fool of myself. I had a magic trick in my pocket, one of those little ball-and-vase tricks-a little container that had a ball in it that you make disappear and reappear-and I got that out and asked, Can you show me how to do this? It was the right thing to do. It made a contact. He knew he was talking to a young magician. He took it, showed me how to do it, gave it back to me, then he looked at my face and said, Would you like to meet those people in that tent over there? Those strange people? And I said, Yes sir, I would. So he led me over there and he hit the tent with his cane and said, Clean up your language! Clean up your language! He took me in, and the first person I met was the illustrated man. Isn't that wonderful? The Illustrated Man! He called himself the tattooed man, but I changed his name later for my book. I also met the strong man, the fat lady, the trapeze people, the dwarf, and the skeleton. They all became characters.

The trailer for the film version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, directed by Francois Truffaut, starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner.

Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I'm glad you're back in my life. I said, What do you mean? I don't know you. He said, You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I'm glad you're back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.

Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that's what attracted him.

When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of "Beautiful Ohio," and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I've never stopped.

Seventy-seven years ago, and I've remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, "Live forever." And I decided to.