One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.
Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.
None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.
Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
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.
No need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.
My story is endless. I put in a teletype roll, you know, you know what they are, you have them in newspapers, and run it through there and fix the margins and just go, go – just go, go, go.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
In writing a weird story I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere, and place the emphasis where it belongs.
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
