The mystery of the universe is not time but size.

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.

The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean - hell, I know that.

If you don't control your temper, your temper will control you.

There were no horror movies or horror books to speak of in the '40s. I picked the '50s because that pretty well spans my life as an appreciator - as somebody who's been involved with this mass cult of horror, from radio and movies and Saturday matinees and books. In the '40s there really wasn't that much. People don't want to read about horrible things in horrible times. So, in the '40s, there was Val Lutin with The Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People and there wasn't much else.

Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me