If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief.

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.

In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance's of theism's truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else.

Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone-I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.

Heaven knows where I'll end up - but it's a safe bet that I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.

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.