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Bradbury sold eight million copies of his books in 36 languages, according to The New York Times' obit.

He attributed his success as a writer to never having gone to college--instead, he read and wrote voraciously. "When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week," he said in an interview with The Paris Review. "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."

Bradbury recently wrote a short essay responding to his favorite Snoopy comic strip about how much rejection he faced when he first began writing. "Starting when I was fifteen I began to send short stories to magazines like Esquire, and they, very promptly, sent them back two days before they got them! I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn't realize what a strong person I was; I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn," he wrote.

But he said later in The Paris Review interview that he did not feel responsible for his own writing success, saying he felt that God helped him write. "The best description of my career as a writer is 'at play in the fields of the Lord.' It's been wonderful fun and I'll be damned where any of it came from. I've been fortunate. Very fortunate," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/science-fiction-author-ray-bradbur
y-dies-144137431.html

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