Ray Bradbury on Ray Bradbury

"[M]y big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.... I’m a lot like Verne—a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo—who in a way is the flip side of Melville’s madman, Ahab—goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace."

-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview