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.
In a letter to James F. Morton, April 1 1927
The vistas I relish most are those in which the sunset plays a transfiguring & glorifying part.
In a letter to Donald Wandrei, April 21 1927
Living things -- usually insane or idiotic members of the family -- concealed in the garrets or secret rooms of old houses are or at least have been literal realities in rural New England -- I was told by someone of how he stopped at a lone farmhouse on some errand years ago, and was nearly frightened out of his wits by the opening of a sliding panel in the kitchen wall, and the appearance of the most horrible, dirt-caked, and matted-bearded face he had ever conceived possible to exist!
In a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, June 1927
Mere grotesqueness is very common; sly, malign madness sometimes lurks around the corner; and berserk, revolting murder under peculiarly messy and clumsy conditions is a matter of not infrequent record.
In a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, June 1927
All the common, unadorned things have been thought and said and repeated a thousand times before. The dull, prosaic world of usual feelings and events is so well "written up" that nothing vital remains to be added.
In a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, June 5 1927
And one may add, that the birth of a dear little chee-ild would not solve all problems in glib nickleodeon fashion! Rather, it would be a complication provocative of even more misery.
In a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, June 12 1927
Chambers is like Rupert Hughes & a few other fallen Titans -- equipped with the right brains & education, but wholly out of the habit of using them.
In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, June 24 1927
Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
In a letter to Fransworth Wright, July 5 1927
Wandrei can tell you all there is to be told about the art of hitch-hiking, whereby the expense of railway fare becomes as obsolete & quaint a memory as the era of good taste in literature!
In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, July 15 1927
There are twenty-eight varieties this season, and we sampled them all within the course of an hour.
About ice cream, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, July 30 1927
And now, at thirty-seven, I am gradually headed for pure antiquarianism and architecture, and away from literature altogether! 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.
In a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, August 28 1927
Well, the orgy is over at last, and the Old Gentlemen is weakly gasping amidst the prodigious welter of work which piled up during his absence. Shall I ever see daylight again? Only Mana-Yood-Sushai can tell! I burrow -- I wallow -- and still there press spectrally upon me the sinister shadows of imperative agenda. Where did I mislay that cyanide? No matter, a revolver will do. But first I must get those Bullen proofs out of the way!
In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, September 6 1927
Of course, so far as personal taste goes, I'm no lover of humanity. To me cats are in every way more graceful and worthy of respect -- but I don't try to raise my personal bias to the spurious dignity of a dogmatic generality...
In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, September 6 1927
That is the perennial grief of an architectural antiquarian -- in a city as large as Providence or Boston something quaint is always being demolished in the interest of alleged progress...
In a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, September 22 1927
As for your new novelette -- look here, young man, you'd better be mighty careful how you treat your aged and dignified Grandpa as here! You mustn't make me doing anything cheerful or wholesome, and remember that only the direst of damnations can befit so inveterate a daemon of the cosmick abysses.
In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, September 24 1727
I haven't very much energy or perseverance -- the uselessness of everything, including even aesthetic effort, overshadows my consciousness & coöperates with my native indolence in defeating all progressive or constructive developments.
In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 1 1927
As to futility & work -- I have come to the comfortably elderly condition of not caring a rap whether I do anything or not!
In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 15 1927
I didn't want the mediaeval stuff, but the book was too good to tear in half.
On the purchase of Goodyear's Roman and Mediaeval Art, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, November 1927
Sir, I refuse to fall into your adroit trap! I simply say -- with a delicate wave of a perfectly manicured and correctly gloved hand -- that you are wrong and I am right. Why? Because I say so! And that is all a gentleman can add to the matter!
In a letter to James F. Morton, November 13 1927
In a way, crosswords do harm by cluttering up the mind with an aimless heap of unusual words selected purely for mechanical exigencies and having no well-proportioned relation to the needs of graceful discourse.
In a letter to James F. Morton, November 17 1927
After walking for some distance, I encounter'd the rusty tracks of a street-railway, & the worm-eaten poles which still held the limp & sagging trolley wire. Following this line, I soon came upon a yellow, vestibuled car numbered 1852 -- of a plain, double-trucked type common from 1900 to 1910. It was untenanted, but evidently ready to start; the trolley being on the wire & the air-brake pump now & then throbbing beneath the floor. I boarded it & looked vainly about for the light switch -- noting as I did so the absence of controller handle which implied the brief absence of the motorman. Then I sat down in one of the cross seats toward the middle, awaiting the arrival of the crew & the starting of the vehicle. Presently I heard a swishing in the sparse grass toward the left, & saw the dark forms of two men looming up in the moonlight. They had the regulation caps of a railway company, & I could not doubt but that they were the conductor & motorman. Then one of them sniffed with singular sharpness, & raised his face to howl to the moon. The other dropped on all fours to run toward the car. I leaped up at once & raced madly out of that car & away across endless leagues of plateau till exhaustion waked me -- doing this not because the conductor had dropped on all fours, but because the face of the motorman was a mere white cone tapeding to one blood-red tentacle. ...
In a letter to Donald Wandrei, November 24 1927, recounting a dream of the night before
In furnishing my Irish colleague with an account of my vivid and active career I did not think it necessary to mention trifles so tame as Satanism and neogonophagy -- nay, nor my voyage up the Oxus, nor my visit to Samarcand, nor how and why I slew the yellow-veiled priest at Lhasa -- that priest whose yellow silken veil stood out too far in front of where his face ought to be, and moved in a manner that I did not like.
In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, December 1927
The Magnum Innominandum does not forget.
In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, December 1927
As for affectation -- I'm not fond of any kind, but hate literary affectation the worst, because it is more permanent and subversive in its essence. We can get rid of our personal affectations when we begin to see their absurdity, but our literary affectations are embalmed in cold print, and have perhaps ruined or at least vitiated what might have been our best work.
In a letter to August Derleth, early December 1927
This especial old bird, according to an anecdote recorded by George Sterling, parted from Bierce under the dramatic circumstances of having a can broken over his head! When I saw his fiction I wondered why Ambrosius didn't use a crowbar.
Describing Adolphus de Castro in a letter to Farnsworth Wright, December 22 1927
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
In a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman, December 28 1927
Yes -- nocturnal howling has an element of fearfulness for me. I always associate it with lean, dog-faced beings that walk sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four, and that lope abroad in the night's small hours.
In a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, January 1928
As for the matter of drinking -- I have never tasted intoxicating liquor, and never intend to; having a strong aesthetic disgust at anything which blunts or coarsens the delicate natural equipoise of the evolved human intellect and imagination.
In a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, February 13 1928
I think drink is ugly, and therefore I have nothing to do with it.
In a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, February 13 1928
Have you read The Castle of Otranto itself? If not, don't! Let the summary in Railo continue to give you a "kick", for the original certainly won't!
In a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, February 14 1928
Coleridge represented a fine balance betwixt mind and fancy, and I like him all the better for not having an excess of sloppy emotion. The fact that his experience came through books rather than life does not militate against him, because he had the rare faculty of accepting the contents of books in an abstract way, as if the material came directly from life with literary filtration. Bookishness becomes tepid and artificial only when one looks at the books instead of through them. So long as they are utilized only as telescopes, and not worshipped for their mechanical selves, they form very acceptable substitutes for vital experience.
In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, April 1928