Here's his video clip page where he talks more about censorship

Fahrenheit 451 is pretty amazing, especially considering it was written in 1953, but Bradbury has become quite the crank. But in a good way.

excerpt:

They had this machine. They had two machines, really. One of them slid down into your stomach like a black cobra down an echoing well looking for all the old water and the old time gathered there. It drank up the green matter that flowed to the top in a slow boil. Did it drink of the darkness? Did it suck out all the poisons accumulated with the years? It fed in silence with an occasional sound of inner suffocation and blind searching. It had an Eye. The impersonal operator of the machine could, by wearing a special optical helmet, gaze into the soul of the person whom he was pumping out. What did the Eye see? He did not say. He saw but did not see what the Eye saw. The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one's yard. The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached. Go on, anyway, shove the bore down, slush up the emptiness, if such a thing could be brought out in the throb of the suction snake. The operator stood smoking a cigarette. The other machine was working, too.

The other machine, operated by an equally impersonal fellow in nonstainable reddish-brown coveralls. This machine pumped all of the blood from the body and replaced it with fresh blood and serum.

"Got to clean 'em out both ways," said the operator, standing over the silent woman. "No use getting the stomach if you don't clean the blood. Leave that stuff in the blood and the blood hits the brain like a mallet, bang, a couple thousand times and the brain just gives up, just quits." From Powell's.

craniac, when I was 11 I read The Martian Chronicles and discovering Bradbury's work diminished much of the other scifi stuff out there for me. A great story teller.

Maybe even a better storyteller than he knows he is, because "451" is so much more important when taken as a story about the horrors of censorship than about the horrors of television. And does anybody but me get an unintended parallel between the 'book people' each keeping one book alive and the evil internet file sharers?

I love Bradbury. His are the first stories I remember reading that I recognized were written by a person, who had written other stories, and had a whole life during which, he just sat down and wrote stories.

I completely disagree with you, wendell, however, that the story is more important as a story about government censorship, for several reasons; one of which is that I think it's worse when people abandon their own thirst for art, literature and thinking than it is when the government tries to constrain the boundaries of that thirst.

He wore his now-standard outfit of a blue dress shirt with a white collar and a jack-o’-lantern tie (Halloween is his favorite day) and white socks.

I would've thought no pants was more of a Harlan Ellison thing.

I was thinking he's old and gets his jollies as best he can.

Me too, arse_hat. After reading the Martian Chronicles, I still gave sci-fi a chance, but never found anything to measure up and eventually gave up on the genre. Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delaney almost saved it for me, but not quite. Delaney's book Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand is still one of my favorites.

Somehow Bradbury gets past my romantic sentimentality filter -- when reading his stuff, now in my jaded 30's, my first instinct is to react against his overflowing gushiness. But he gets past my defenses every time, and I consistently find myself drawn in, charmed, seduced, and enchanted.

And does anybody but me get an unintended parallel between the 'book people' each keeping one book alive and the evil internet file sharers?

Wendell: I don't quite get what you mean, but it sounds interesting, would you car to expand?

Also: Kill Your TV