The 'punch' of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law - an imaginative escape from palling reality - hence, phenomena rather than persons are the logical 'heroes.'
— H. P. Lovecraft
In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs.
The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.
All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.
My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.
I could not write about 'ordinary people' because I am not in the least interested in them.
All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.
Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.
Heaven knows where I'll end up - but it's a safe bet that I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.
If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.
There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story: one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax.
Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or 'outsideness' without laying stress on the emotion of fear.
I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider'd but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg'd in with infrequency and Discrimination.
I do not think that any realism is beautiful.
I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.
From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.
It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may.
If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder, I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.
Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design.
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.
I am well-nigh resolv'd to write no more tales but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dream for a boarish Publick.
Adulthood is hell.
I am essentially a recluse who will have very little to do with people wherever he may be. I think that most people only make me nervous - that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn't.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.
What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.
It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such an one more agreeable and interesting.
Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.
