"Libraries raised me," he said in a 2009 interview while trying to raise money for a library in Ventura County. "I don't believe in colleges and universities.… When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
Bradbury wasn't kidding; libraries were his education … and his muse. He wrote his breakthrough novel, 1953's "Fahrenheit 451," on a rental typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library, pumping in a dime for every half hour of typing. (The book cost him nine bucks and change to write.)