When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.

Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.

That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.