9 Quotes by L. Sprague de Camp

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.

It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.

In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.

Therefore, no matter how the world makes out in the next few centuries, a large class of readers at least will not be too surprised at anything. They will have been through it all before in fictional form, and will not be too paralyzed with astonishment to try to cope with contingencies as they arise.

Speech sounds can be analyzed into fundamental units called phonemes; these move around like protozoa in a drop of water, and, like protozoa, join together and split up.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man’s good.

The spook begins to interfere with the writer’s normal mental processes. Sometimes the ghost, by appealing to the writer’s sympathies, tempts the writer to imitate him in one way or another. Catherine says that, when I was working on Lovecraft, I even began to dress in the style affected by HPL, like that of a well-bred undertaker.