American author (1890-1937)
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family"
I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 28, 1934
I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Maurice W. Moe, May 15, 1918
It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Thing on the Doorstep"
Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to C. L. Moore, August 1936
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Selected Letters
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Dagon"
Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
My theological beliefs are likely to startle one who has imagined me as an orthodox adherent of the Anglican Church. My father was of that faith, and was married by its rites, yet, having been educated in my mother's distinctively Yankee family, I was early placed in the Baptist sunday school. There, however, I soon became exasperated by the literal Puritanical doctrines, and constantly shocked my preceptors by expressing scepticism of much that was taught me. It became evident that my young mind was not of a religious cast, for the much exhorted "simple faith" in miracles and the like came not to me.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 16, 1915
No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to E. Hoffmann Price, August 15, 1934
All great humorists are sad.... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest--the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible -- though I know not in what proportion -- still remains.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Colour Out of Space"
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
attributed, The Little Black Book of Writers' Wisdom
It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Temple"
The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect successions of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Allowable Rhyme"
More wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days I have watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The White Ship"
It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now--but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Harry O. Fischer, February 1937
There are, without doubt, great possibilities in the serious exploitation of the astronomical tale; as a few semi-classics like "The War of the Worlds", "The Last and First Men", "Station X", "The Red Brain", and Clark Ashton Smith's best work prove. But the pioneers must be prepared to labour without financial return, professional recognition, or the encouragement of a reading majority whose taste has been seriously warped by the rubbish it has devoured. Fortunately sincere artistic creation is its own incentive and reward, so that despite all obstacles we need not despair of the future of a fresh literary form whose present lack of development leaves all the more room for brilliant and fruitful experimentation.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction", Californian, winter 1935
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Colour Out of Space"