DISILLUSIONMENT CAN BE GLAMOROUS, an interview with Thomas Ligotti by E.M. Angerhuber (EMA) and Thomas Wagner (TW), January 2001 for The Art of GrimScribe

I discovered the works of H. P. Lovecraft. I found that the meaningless and menacing universe described in Lovecraft's stories corresponded very closely to the place I was living at that time, and ever since for that matter. I was grateful that someone else had perceived the world in a way similar to my own view.

the universe as something thin and unstable, something that barely has the quivering and illusory quality of a mirage and yet, alas, refuses to dissolve completely into nothingness. | I could never be a professional writer for the simple reason that I'm not interested in the same things that people who buy the majority of the books in this world are interested in. Like Lovecraft, I'm not interested in people and their relationships. That alone counts me out as a professional writer. I also have a bad attitude toward the world. I think that life is a curse and so on. | Even to carry on until tomorrow is act of ecstatic lunacy, since every tomorrow just brings you closer to that last one, which will probably not shape up to be a very good day. | [In My Work Is Not Yet Done] there are only provisional good guys and bad guys. Ultimately everyone in those stories is bad news, as is the entire human race in my view. And, most importantly, those stories only begin with horrors in a workplace setting. Ultimately they are about something else altogether. | "all-consuming darkness" kind of suggests that there's something going on in the universe. That's not what I would wish. I don't want a universe in which even nothing could be going on.