“The essence of nightmare lies less in the simple experience of horrors than in the unpreventable fruition of horrors foreknown.”

“We bomb your country, creating a humanitarian nightmare, then lock you inside. That’s a horror movie, not a foreign policy.”

“The horror! The horror!”

“In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror—indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly. Dunsany, indeed, has said exquisitely almost everything I could possibly wish to say; so that when I indulge in sheer phantasy I can do no more than imitate him. Thus horror alone is left as my peculiar kingdom, & in it I must hold my lowly reproduction of a Plutonian court.”

“The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.”

“Readers love fantasy, but we need horror. Smart horror. Truthful horror. Horror that helps us make sense of a cruelly senseless world.”

“But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.”

“The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.”

“A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.”

“No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”