Ingenuous Age once more essays to find / A proper Gift for Youth's sophistick Mind, / Well tho' he know how bootless 'tis to send / Aught that his own old Head can comprehend.
Accompanying a volume of Proust sent as a gift to Frank Belknap Long for Christmas 1928
Of Wit and Beauty keeps discreetly chary, / And forfeits Sense to be contemporary.
Accompanying a volume of Proust sent as a gift to Frank Belknap Long for Christmas 1928
Devoid of Pomp as Woolworth's or McCrory's, / And cerebral as Vogue or Snappy-Stories.
Accompanying a volume of Proust sent as a gift to Frank Belknap Long for Christmas 1928
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!
In a letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 1929
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
In a letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 1929
Here are we -- and yonder yawns the universe.
In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, February 20 1929
Speaking of boredom -- why don't you try to accumulate a library which will furnish you with a solid reserve of intellectual and aesthetic pabulum? The expense -- unless you are particular about the appearance of the books -- is truly next to nothing; for one can obtain astonishing bargains on the 10-cent and 25-cent counters of second-hand book shops.
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929
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.
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929
But the important thing to consider is the prodigious vitality of the Roman idea. Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929
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.
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929
I can dream a whole cycle of colonial life from merely gazing on a tattered old book or almanack with the long 'f'.
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929
It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture -- drugged and frenzied with the hasheesh of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy.
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929
All of my 38 1/2 years show in me, I guess; and so far as my temperament is concerned, I was born an old man.
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929
However -- I am not quite such a solemn prig as you probably assume from my letters.
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929
My fiction can't be compared with Poe's or Machen's, but I take no less pleasure in writing it on that account.
In a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929
The masters of art are not to 'bow down before', but to enjoy rationally & with a proper appreciation.
In a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929
Language, vocabulary, ideas, imagery -- everything succumbed to my one intense purpose of thinking & dreaming myself back into that world of periwigs & long s's which for some odd reason seemed to me the normal world.
In a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929
Even when I break away, it is generally only through imitating something else! There are my "Poe" pieces & my "Dunsany" pieces -- but alas -- where are my Lovecraft pieces?
In a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929
One thing I'll say for labour; & that is, that it isn't as offensive as the corresponding mutatory force which now threatens culture in America. I refer to the force of business as a dominating motive in life, & a persistent absorber of the strongest creative energies of the American people.
In a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, June 10 1929
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.
In a letter to Robert E. Howard, October 4 1930
... an isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the publick at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.
In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, 3 Nov 1930
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination...
In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, February 27 1931
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. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.
In a letter to Maurice W. Moe, August 3 1931
Despite my tremendous admiration for things like Dunsany's Gods of the Mountain and O'Neill's Emperor Jones, I have never as yet employed drama as a medium of expression. Probably the reason is that in the sort of work I am trying to do human characters matter very little.
In a letter to Harold S. Farnese, September 22 1932
To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.