Rajesh Naidu

“Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.”
― Peter Straub, If You Could See Me Now

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.”
― Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.”
― Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps