Quoted By:
On Lovecraft's advice on writing during his mid-30s
>""This, then, is the writer's fivefold problem: 1. To get the facts of life. 2. To think straight and tell the truth. 3. To cut out maudlin and extravagent emotion. 4. To cultivate an ear for strong, direct, harmonious, simple, and graphic language. 5. To write what one really sees and feels."
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On Lovecraft's influences in his mid-30s
>"Favorite authors - in most intimate personal sense - Poe, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare, Algernon Blackwood"
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On Lovecraft rejecting practical nihilism
>"The matters crops up in a discussion with Morton, who appears to have questioned why Lovecraft was so passionately concerned about the preservation of Western civilization when he believed in a purposeless cosmos: "It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which gave us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is - since nothing means anything by itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever."
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On Lovecraft's defence of tradition
>"Amidst the variability there is only one anchor of fixity which we can seize upon as the working pseudo-standard of "values" which we need in order to feel settled & contended - & that anchor is tradition, the potent emotional legacy bequeathed to us by the massed experience of ancestors, individual or national or biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally & pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of "lostness" in endless time & space."
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