Ray Bradbury: I want a close up of the cat now?
Ray Bradbury: Okay, all right.
Crew member: Thank you, Ray.
Crew member: Would you like to introduce yourself a second time?
Ray Bradbury: Well, can't you punch it in?
Crew member: Sure, I can punch it in, but I like to have -- I like to have two.
Ray Bradbury: I'm going to take a nap now, yeah. If that gets too high,
I become strangled, you know. Have to be careful here.
I suppose you wonder why I've called you all here. I want to identify myself.
I'm Ray Bradbury, but you're very curious, aren't you, to find out how I fell in
love with books. Now remember this, love is at the center of your life. The
things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love
should be things that you do. So that's what you learn from books. I learned
to read when I was three years old. I loved comic strips. I loved the cartoons
on Sunday. And I got a book of fairy tales when I was five years old, and I
fell in love with reading all these wonderful stories like "Beauty and the Beast"
and "Jack and the Beanstalk." So I began with fantasy, and by the time I was
three years old, I saw my first movie and I fell in love with the motion
pictures I saw, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and I hoped to grow up to be a
hunchback. And then, when I was five, I saw "The Phantom of the Opera" with
Lon Chaney, I became infatuated with Lon Chaney. And when I was six, I saw a film
on dinosaurs, and dinosaurs filled my life. And by the age of six, I began to
read about dinosaurs and they affected my whole life, and wound up with me
getting the work on "Moby Dick" when I was 33 years old, because I fell in
love with dinosaurs when I was six. So you see how these things work out, how a
thing that begins when you're three and six and 10 and 12, wind up in your
fictions when you're in your 30s. The things that you do should be things that
you love, and things that you love should be things that you do.
I was seven years old when I went to the library for the first time, and that
was a great adventure. But along the way, when I was six years old, I traveled
from Illinois out to Tucson, Arizona. As I traveled with my family, the first
thing I did when I jumped out of the car at night to go to a motel to sleep,
I ran to the library, accompanied by October leaves blowing with me all along the
way. And I was hoping to find books about the "Land of Oz" by L. Frank Baum,
and "Tarzan" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, or if they had books on magic. And I'd
open the door of the library and I'd look in, and all those people were waiting
for me in there. You see, libraries is people. It's not books. People are
waiting in there, thousands of people, who wrote the books. So it's much more
personal than just a book. So when you open a book, the person pops out and
becomes you. You look at Charles Dickens, and you are Charles Dickens, and he
is you. So you go in the library and you pull a book off the shelf, and you
open it, and what are you looking for? A mirror. All of a sudden, a mirror is
there and you see yourself, but your name is Charles Dickens. That's what a
library is. Or the book is Shakespeare, and so you become William Shakespeare or
you become Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost or all the great poets. So you find
the author who can lead you through the dark. And Shakespeare started me there,
and "Hamlet" started me there, and "Richard III." And Emily Dickinson led the
way for me, and Edgar Allen Poe said, "This way. Here's the light." So you go
into the library and discover yourself.
My greatest influences are John Steinbeck. I read "The Grapes of Wrath" when
I was 19 years old. And when I wrote "The Martian Chronicles," I needed a
structure for it. I didn't realize that I went to the "The Grapes of Wrath"...
I learned how to structure a novel...and "The Martian Chronicles" is completely
the structure of "The Grapes of Wrath." So John Steinbeck wound up as my skeleton.
Alone at night when I was 12 years old and I looked at the planet Mars, and
I said, "Take me home." And the planet Mars took me home and I never came back.
The important thing is this: when I got out of high school, we had no money.
I couldn't go to college and the greatest thing happened is, I went to the
library. The library educates. Teachers inspire, but libraries fulfill you.
I got a job selling newspapers on a street corner and made $10 a week, and every
morning I got up and I wrote stories, and in the evening, I went to the library.
And I expressed myself, when I was 19, about my loves of life, and I put it into
my books. And that's the secret of my life. Thank god I went my way, and not
the way other people told me to go. It's your ideas that count, and a library
can help you with your ideas, because all these great teachers, all these great
writers are teaching you when you sit in the middle of a library and let them
radiate upon you. That's it, isn’t it? You've got to go to the library for an
education. The library is the answer.
When I was 12 years old, I looked at the hair on the back of my hand and I said,
"My god, I'm alive. Why didn't someone tell me that I was alive?" A month
later, a carnival man came along at a carnival down by the lakefront. And he
sat in an electric chair. He had his sword full of fire. He saw me in the
audience. He pointed his sword at me and touched me on the end of my nose, and
said, "Live forever. Live forever." Why he said that, I don’t know, but I went
down for a meeting with him the next day, because I wanted to say, "How can I
live forever?" And he took me in a tent to show me all the freaks. And I met
inside the tent "The Illustrated Man." Isn't that wonderful? I met
"The Illustrated Man" when I was 12, and I realized he'd given me a gift of some
sort. I knew that my life had changed, and I went home, and when I got there,
they gave me a toy typewriter. I wrote my first story. I became a writer,
because that period of a few days, I discovered I was alive. I discovered maybe
I could live forever if I became a writer. So I've written every day since that
day I arrived in Tucson, Arizona. And the last 75 years, I've never stopped writing.
So luckily, I got that first book of fairy tales, "Beauty and the Beast." And my
aunt introduced me to "Alice in Wonderland" and to Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."
And all of these things impinged upon me and caused me to vibrate, to
fall in love constantly with books.
A good library, when you open any book, smells of dust. The dust of time.
Egyptian dust. The dust of all the parts of the world that blew in the winds.
So, therefore, when you lift a book you can snuff it, and it smells of ancient
Egypt and all the loves and the life, all the people that lived in there, all of
the beautiful women, all the brave warriors are there. And the scent of these
people, and the smell of those wondrous lands is how a book smells.
Well, we should learn from history about the destruction of books. When I was
15 years old, Hitler burned books in the streets of Berlin. And it terrified
me, because I was a librarian and he was touching my life. All those great
plays, all that great poetry, all those wonderful essays, all those great
philosophers. So it became very personal, didn't it. Then I found out about
Russia burning the books behind the scenes. But they did it in such a way that
people didn't know about it. They killed the authors behind the scenes. They
burned the authors instead of the books. So I learned then how dangerous it all
was, because if you didn't have books and the ability to read, you couldn't be
part of any civilization. You couldn't be part of a democracy.
Leaders in various countries are scared of books because books teach things that
they don't want to have taught. Well, if you know how to read, you have a
complete education about life. Then you know how to vote within a democracy. But
if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great
thing about our country, is we are a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.
I published the first version of "Fahrenheit," "The Fireman," in a science
fiction magazine, Galaxy, in February, 1951. And Ballantine came along, and
they read that short novel of 25,000 words and said, "Can you extend the novel?
Can you write another 25,000 words, and we'll publish a full novel and you've
got to find a title for it though. 'The Fireman' is not it." I got curious at
what temperature does book paper catch fire and burn? So I called the chemistry
department at UCLA and they didn't know. I called SC and they didn't know.
I said, "Dummy. Call the fire department." So I went, I called the fire chief at
the fire department in downtown LA. I said, "Mr. Chief, could you tell me at
what temperature book paper catches fire and burns?" He says, "Wait, I'll be
right back." He came back and he said, "Book paper catches fire and burns at
451 degrees Fahrenheit." I said, "That's good." So I'll reverse it. It's got
to be "Fahrenheit 451." So that's how I found out what the temperature was.
When I moved into LA with my family, I had two daughters. I needed an office
because my daughters were very loud and wonderful and lovely, but I had no money
for an office. I was wandering around up at UCLA and I heard typing in a room
down in the basement. And I went down to the basement and I found a room where
they had 12 typewriters in it. I could rent a typewriter for 10 cents a half hour.
So I said, "My god, this is my office." Doesn't matter I was surrounded
by students. I got a bag of dimes. I moved into the typing room in the
basement of the library, and I spent $9.00 and $9.80 and I wrote "Fahrenheit 451"
in its first form called "The Fireman." But the exciting thing about that was
running up and down stairs and grabbing books, and bringing them down to my
typewriter, and opening them, finding a quote I could put in the book for Montag
to read. So you see, what a place for "Fahrenheit 451" to be written. In a
library, of all places, where it wasn't being burned.
So I made a contract with Ballantine and I went to the library again where, with
the typing and the typing room, and I added 25,000 words. How did I do that?
I got the characters to come to me. Montag came and said, "Do you know who I am
completely?" I said, "No." I said, "Tell me." And the fire chief came to me,
and he told me about his prior life. I said to the fire chief, "Why did you
burn books?" And he told me. And Clarisse McClellan came, who was a 16 year
old girl, who was in love with books and libraries and life. And she told me
more about herself. And Fabers came to me, and he was a philosopher, and he
wrote the book. You see, all my characters write the book. I don’t write the
book. All these characters come to me and say, "Listen to me." And then
I listen to them and I put it down, and the book gets written. That's how
I write, you see. All these lovers surround me, and they love life and they tell me about it.
When I came out of a restaurant when I was 30 years old, and I went walking
along Wilshire Boulevard with a friend and a police car pulled up, and the
policeman got up and came up to us and said, "What are you doing?" I said,
"Putting one foot in front of the other." And that was the wrong answer. But
he kept saying, you know, "Look in this direction or that direction. There are
no pedestrians." But that gave me the idea for "The Pedestrian." And "The Pedestrian"
turned into Montag. So the police officer is responsible for the writing of "Fahrenheit 451."
The book was very well received because up until it was published most of my
books didn't get reviewed. They got obituary reviews about an inch big. But
"Fahrenheit" came out and well-known authors all over the United States wrote me
letters about it and reacted to it. So at long last, I was accepted into the intellectual community.
Well, Isherwood helped me first. When I was 30 years old, he called me on the
phone. I'd given him a copy of "The Martian Chronicles" and he called me. He
says, "My god," he said, "Mr. Bradbury, do you know what you've written?"
I said, "What?" He said, "You’ve written an extraordinary book. I'm going to
review it for Tomorrow Magazine." So he changed my life. It was the first big
review. And he called me, and he said, "Aldous Huxley wants to meet you." And
Aldous Huxley was the author of "Brave New World," my hero. "I'd love to meet
Aldous Huxley." So I went to have tea with him one day, and Mr. Huxley leaned
forward, and said, "Mr. Bradbury, do you know what you are?" I said, "What?"
He said, "You're a poet. You're a poet!" And he told me I was a poet. You
see, my publishers told me I was a novelist. I didn't know I was a novelist,
because I was in love. And he tells me I'm a poet. I didn't know I was a poet,
because I was in love with Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and all the great poets.
But you see what love does for you? You don't know what you are because you're in love.
Clarisse is me. Clarisse McClellan is Ray Bradbury, the young boy who fell in
love with life. And Clarisse is the essence of life and the essence of love.
And she educates Montag, without knowing she's an educator. She's a librarian.
She's a teacher who inspires. And he then dares to go home and steal a book and
look at it, because Clarisse McClellan, Ray Bradbury, told him to do it.
Books are smart and brilliant and wise.
Most important book in my life is "A Christmas Carol," Charles Dickens, because
it's all about life and it's all about death. So it's a combination. And you
read that book and you come out changed, along with Ebenezer Scrooge. Whatever
Scrooge is in you is vanquished, is made to disappear, and that's a great book.
And when I was in my 30s, I wrote "The Halloween Tree," which is in a way my
version of "A Christmas Carol."
I'd like to make a point now, and let me say again. Here, I have a book,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Tender is the Night," and I have seven copies of this book.
I've been to Paris 20 times. Every time I've gone to Paris, I take this book
and I start at the Eiffel Tower, and I walk across Paris, from dawn until sunset.
and I stop in restaurants and I read another chapter of this book by F. Scott Fitzgerald,
and by the end of the day I've read it again completely. So I have
all these copies of this one book that I read in Paris when I was walking. So
reading should be a total experience. You can read it while you walk, too, and
you sit in restaurants and read the next chapter, and fall more completely in love.
I found my love in a bookstore, not in a library, but a bookstore is a library.
And I met a pretty girl there who waited on me, and I took her to coffee and
I took her to dinner and I fell in love with her and the books surrounding her.
And she took a vow of poverty a year later and married me, because my income was
nothing. And she was a rich girl, and she gave up all of her money to become
poor like me and live in Venice, without a telephone, without a car. But we
lived on love and books, and my writing. So that's the answer to life. If you
can find a person to love, who loves life as much as you do, and loves books as
much as you do, grab her or him and get married. It's pretty good, isn't it. Ha-ha!
Life is wonderful. That's a wonderful thing.
The reason why my books are popular because they know I'm a lover, and my works
are poetic. I didn't know I was writing poetry, but I am. And -- but at the
center of my books is the gift of life. That day, when I was 12, and discovered
I was alive. When people touch my books, they're alive. So that's the gift
I give to them, and I want them to carry them back and forth to the library.
Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells
you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love so you as a child must
imagine what you want, and then you build it. Anything that you want, but
imagination should be the center of your life. Fantasy at the center of your life.
Here lies Ray Bradbury who loved life completely.
Crew member: That's beautiful.
Ray Bradbury: I'm going to have a t-shirt made. It says, "Stand at the top of
the cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down."
We are all the sons and the daughters of time, so I thank the universe for making
life on earth, and allowing me to come alive here.
