The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. – H. P. Lovecraft
Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience. – H. P. Lovecraft
No breed of cats in its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even slightly ungraceful – a record against which must be pitted the depressing spectacle of impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously shapeless and shaggy Airedales, and the like. – H. P. Lovecraft
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! – H. P. Lovecraft
Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point. – H. P. Lovecraft
A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone, and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. – H. P. Lovecraft
We call ourselves a dog’s ‘master’ – but who ever dared to call himself the ‘master’ of a cat? We own a dog – he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat – he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there. – H. P. Lovecraft
I am well-nigh resolv’d to write no more tales but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dream for a boarish Publick. – H. P. Lovecraft
Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and shambles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. – H. P. Lovecraft
I could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them. – H. P. Lovecraft
The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic – nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae. – H. P. Lovecraft
In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs. – H. P. Lovecraft
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination. – H. P. Lovecraft
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish. – H. P. Lovecraft
We must realise that man’s nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles. – H. P. Lovecraft
To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form – and local human passions and conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other worlds and universes. – H. P. Lovecraft
Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or ‘outsideness’ without laying stress on the emotion of fear. – H. P. Lovecraft
There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story: one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax. – H. P. Lovecraft
All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large. – H. P. Lovecraft
Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long – then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression. – H. P. Lovecraft
I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect. – H. P. Lovecraft
We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. – H. P. Lovecraft
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. – H. P. Lovecraft
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams. – H. P. Lovecraft
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time. – H. P. Lovecraft