And I met all the editors. And they all said,”Well don’t you have a novel?”

I said, “no, I’m a sprinter; I write short stories.”

“Well, we don’t publish short stories. They don’t sell.”

And I was ready to go home defeated. And the last night there I had dinner with Walter Bradbury– no relation– from Doubleday Publishers. And during the dinner he said, “Ray, what about all those Martian stories you’ve been writing. What if you tied them all together in a tapestry and called it The Martian Chronicles? Do you think you could do that?”

Via Kevyn Winkless.