“My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.”

American science fiction writer and short story author of the mid-20th century, Bradbury crafted vivid, poetic visions of the future and human nature. His works like *Fahrenheit 451* and *The Martian Chronicles* explore themes of censorship, memory, and the boundaries between reality and imagination.