“I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.”
RAY BRADBURY, novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer (1920-2012)
Photo: Ray Bradbury at the Palms-Rancho Park Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, located at 2920 Overland Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90064. In the photo, he is wearing the medal he received in 2007 from the France Minister of Culture as Commandeur, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Photo by Gary.
I had the pleasure of meeting Ray Bradbury on a couple of occasions. He graciously blurbed one of my books, and we attended a reading together for a book I edited with the legendary radio writer Norman Corwin. Bradbury had said that Corwin inspired him to become a writer. Bradbury was a kind and generous individual. He said he never let a week go by without writing a short story. Based on that, I calculate we’ll see a new posthumous publication from him for a long time to come.