Authors:
  • It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now - but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived.

    Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in "Selected Letters V, 1934-1937" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (pp. 416-417), 1976.