I do not care to listen; obloquy injures my self-esteem and I am skeptical of praise.

Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.

Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

I suffer from a spiritual malaise which manifests itself in outbursts of vicious rage.

If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.