Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012)
American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer.
Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.
I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.
But at least I don't suffer from self-deluding identity problem like, say, Carl Sagan does.
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.
Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that I’m not responsible for any of this. It’s from God. And I’m so grateful, so, so grateful.