Ray Bradbury is the author of novels, short stories, essays, plays, and poems. Born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920, he published his first stories at the age of nineteen. Now numbering in the hundreds, his stories have won many awards and have appeared in a variety of places and forms, including film and television. About his ability to write so much material, Bradbury says, "My stories run up and bite me in the leg—I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."

Bradbury believes that fame doesn't make a writer a writer. He says, "I think somebody who writes every day and looks at the workaday world through the prism of literature and words is a writer." According to Bradbury, writing "is a matter of attitude and a way of life, not how you pay your bills or whether you have talent or not."

Bradbury also thinks that reading is an important part of writing: "You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads."