The Martian Chronicles quotes

One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.

The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land.

The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

It was Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio that set me free.

I bumped into Christopher Isherwood in a bookstore when I was 30, just after 'The Martian Chronicles' had been published. Three nights later he called me and told me I had written an incredible book.