Charles Beaumont Quotes & Sayings

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. — Charles Beaumont

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") — Charles Beaumont

The city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were dammed off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things.
Until it was no more.
Leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries choked beneath millions and millions of tons of hardened stone.
The birth of a city ... It had become the death of a world. — Charles Beaumont

Came Honker's trip to Slice City along about then: our sax-man got a neck all full of the sharpest kind of steel. So we were out one horn. And you could tell: we played a little bit too rough, and the head-arrangements Collins and His Crew grew up to, they needed Honker's grease in the worst way. But we'd been together for five years or more, and a new man just didn't play somehow. We were this one solid thing, like a unit, and somebody had cut off a piece of us and we couldn't grow the piece back so we just tried to get along anyway, bleeding every night, bleeding from that wound. ("Black Country") — Charles Beaumont

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. — Charles Beaumont

Honest men make unconvincing liars,' I lied convincingly. — Charles Beaumont

You know, there's a certain irony in the fact that our lives and perhaps the lives of everyone on Earth may depend on Captain Patterson's sex appeal. — Charles Beaumont

A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth.
He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them.
But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. ("Hunger") — Charles Beaumont

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