Robert E. Howard Quotes - Page 3

I'll say one thing about an oil boom; it will teach a kid that Life's a pretty rotten thing as quick as anything I can think of.

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words.

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat & stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame crimson, and I am content"......Conan the Cimmerian.

How can I wear the harness of toil And sweat at the daily round, While in my soul forever The drums of Pictdom sound?

Youngsters of this generation seem not quite so hazardous except in the way of mechanical speed, bad liquor and venereal diseases.

In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.

It is better to go in the dark when the road must pass a lion and there is no other road.

I am unable to rouse much interest in any highly civilized race, country or epoch, including this one.

Rome got some peachy pastings when she tried to lick the Irish.

Coming, as I do, from mountain folk on one side and sea followers on the other, there are few old songs of the hills or the sea with which I am not familiar.

It was no ape, neither was it a man. It was some shambling horror spawned in the mysterious, nameless jungles of the south, where strange life teemed in the reeking rot without the dominance of man, and drums thundered in temples that had never known the tread of a human foot.

In the hill country, civilization steals in last, and the people retain much of the crude but vigorous mode of expression of the colonial days and earlier.

What always was must always be.

But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.

It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.

Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.

I reckon if I ever marry, she will have to be a strong woman in a circus or something.

No man can be convinced when he will not.

Animals are neither gods nor fiends, but men in their way without the lust and greed of man.

But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.

All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre— The Feast is over, and the lamps expire.

A woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to any about her.

One objection I have heard voiced to works of this kind—dealing with Texas—is the amount of gore spilled across the pages. It can not be otherwise. In order to write a realistic and true history of any part of the Southwest, one must narrate such things, even at the risk of monotony.

I became a writer in spite of my environments.