“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.”

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs.

Of our relation to all creation we can never know anything whatsoever. All is immensity and chaos. But, since all this knowledge of our limitations cannot possibly be of any value to us, it is better to ignore it in our daily conduct of life.

My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.

Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

The most merciful thing in the world, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

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.

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.

This fond attachment to the well-known place Whence first we started into life’s long race.

Success is sweetest to one who has known failure.

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

I just go with the flow, I follow the yellow brick road. I don’t know where it’s going to lead me, but I follow it.

The term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result

There are words which a man cannot resist from a woman, even though he knows them to be false.

I was perhaps the worst student you have ever seen. You know, I thought I was stupid, all my classmates thought I was stupid, so there was general agreement.

But mad people never die. That’s a well-known fact. They’ve nothing to trouble them, and they live for ever.