Quotes from Charles Beaumont

All the fantasy writers I know have a way of dwelling on their own fears and phobias. A writer spends his life being his own psychiatrist.

He stopped and leaned against a pole and looked up at the deaf and swollen sky. It was a movement of dark shapes, a hurrying, a running. He closed his eyes. ("Hunger")

If one could only discover the unwritten bases of black magic and apply formulae to them, we would find that they were merely another form of science... perhaps less advance, perhaps more.

Honest men make unconvincing liars,' I lied convincingly.

One of the wonderful things about beer is that a little bit, sipped at the proper speed, can give one the courage to do and say things one would ordinarily not have the courage to even dream of doing and saying.

I know that ghosts and demons did exist, they did, if only you thought about them long enough and hard enough.

And that's the whole point. The mind, Doctor. It's everything. If you think you have a pain in your arm and there's no physical reason for it, you don't hurt any less.

Symbolism, to Carnaday, was superstitious nonsense. Psychiatry, though, was worse. It was the purest sort of buncombe, hardly as respectable as spiritualism.

Ultimately the work has to command the podium. - David J. Schow

A train thunders by late at night, you gaze idly at the dark rushing mass, you see a patch of light and within that patch of light, a face; in a wink of time it is gone - but, having seen it, you know it will never be gone, you know you will see that face in your dreams perhaps forever. Such is the insubstantial stuff of which fiction - or madness - is made.

I thought that beauty alone would satisfy, but the soul is gone. I can't bear those empty, staring eyes.