Top 100 Robert E Howard Quotes
#1. He had a stellar talent. I not only lost a contemporary in the death of Robert E. Howard. The world lost a writer of extraordinary gifts.
Murray Leinster
#2. As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.
Joe R. Lansdale
#3. Like the Society for Creative Anachronism, The Ballad of the White Horse depicted "the Middle Ages as they should have been." Chesterton's ballad made a lasting impression on Robert E. Howard, who praised it in letters to his friend Clyde Smith.
Joseph Laycock
#4. I think (Robert E.) Howard often wrote with his heart, but not always with his head.
Stephen Jones
#5. These figures are black, yet they are not like negroes. I have never seen their like." "Let
Robert E. Howard
#6. Rome got some peachy pastings when she tried to lick the Irish.
Robert E. Howard
#7. A true fanatic, his promptings were reasons enough for his actions.
Robert E. Howard
#8. Don't you think that as a people, Americans have less poetry, real poetry, in their souls than any other nations?
Robert E. Howard
#10. 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.
Robert E. Howard
#11. Conan mentally termed the creatures black men, for lack of a better term; instinctively he knew that these tall ebony beings were not men, as he understood the term. No
Robert E. Howard
#12. What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?
I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.
The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;
Rush in and die, dogs - I was a man before I was a king.
Robert E. Howard
#13. Aye, you white dog, you are like all your race; but to a black man gold can never pay for blood.
Robert E. Howard
#14. When you allow the elevation of a man, one can be sure that you'll profit by his advancement.
Robert E. Howard
#15. It was passed on by the hook-nosed herdsmen of the grasslands, from the dwellers in tents to the dwellers in the squat stone cities where kings with curled blueblack beards worshipped round-bellied gods with curious rites.
Robert E. Howard
#16. The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!
Robert E. Howard
#17. I don't believe I ever saw an Oklahoman who wouldn't fight at the drop of a hat
and frequently drop the hat himself.
Robert E. Howard
#18. 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.
Robert E. Howard
#19. Lift that scimitar against me, you Hyrkanian pig and I'll gut you where you stand!
Robert E. Howard
#20. Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.
Robert E. Howard
#21. 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.
Robert E. Howard
#22. It is better to go in the dark when the road must pass a lion and there is no other road.
Robert E. Howard
#23. Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars.
Robert E. Howard
#24. Man can be that which he wishes to be; form and substance, they are but shadows. The mind, the ego, the essence of the god-dream
that is real, that is immortal.
Robert E. Howard
#25. In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.
Robert E. Howard
#27. They trapped the Lion on Shamu's plain; They weighted his limbs with an iron chain; They cried aloud in the trumpet-blast, They cried, "The lion is caged at last!" Woe to the Cities of river and plain If ever the Lion stalks again! - Old Ballad.
Robert E. Howard
#29. What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words.
Robert E. Howard
#30. I have come to believe that mankind eternally hovers on the brinks of secret oceans of which it knows nothing.
Robert E. Howard
#31. A wolf was no less a wolf because a whim of chance caused him to run with the watch-dogs.
Robert E. Howard
#32. Blast your soul, you hussy!" he exclaimed in exasperation.
Robert E. Howard
#34. A pantherish twist and shift of his body avoided the blundering rush of two yellow swordsmen, and the blade of one missing its objective, was sheathed in the breast of the other. A
Robert E. Howard
#35. I'm not going out of my way looking for devils; but I wouldn't step out of my path to let one go by.
Robert E. Howard
#36. I see in the papers where Roy Guthrie committed suicide. Why, I wonder?
Robert E. Howard
#37. It is only the promise of death that makes life worth living.
Robert E. Howard
#39. What is death but a traversing of eternities and a crossing of cosmic oceans?
Robert E. Howard
#40. My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.
Robert E. Howard
#42. I reckon if I ever marry, she will have to be a strong woman in a circus or something.
Robert E. Howard
#43. 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.
Robert E. Howard
#44. Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
Robert E. Howard
#45. We're making tin gods out of those poor buffoons in Hollywood; I dote on movies and appreciate the scanty art therein but I consider the profession about the most debased and debasing I know.
Robert E. Howard
#46. 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.
Robert E. Howard
#47. I never saw a man fight as Conan fought. He put his back to the courtyard wall, and before they overpowered him the dead men were strewn in heaps thigh-deep about him. But at last they dragged him down, a hundred against one.
Robert E. Howard
#48. He was no defensive fighter; even in the teeth of overwhelming odds he always carried the war to the enemy.
Robert E. Howard
#52. A woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to any about her.
Robert E. Howard
#53. All fled - all done, so lift me on the pyre
The Feast is over, and the lamps expire.
Robert E. Howard
#54. You black dog!" A red mist of fury swept across Conan's eyes. "Were I free I'd give you a broken back!
Robert E. Howard
#57. The poem you sent me was as fiery and virile as anything you've ever written - or anybody else, for that matter. Especially the second part went to my brain like the flaming liquor of insanity. No one else besides Jack London has the power to move me just that way.
Robert E. Howard
#58. Any but the most brutish of men must be touched with a certain awe or wonder at the baring of a woman's naked soul.
Robert E. Howard
#59. Conan, grim, blood-stained, naked but for a loin-cloth, shackles on his mighty limbs, his blue eyes blazing beneath the tangled black mane which fell over his low broad forehead.
Robert E. Howard
#60. the mere fact of a black figure racing across the landscape carrying a white captive was bizarre enough,
Robert E. Howard
#61. The five-foot blade crushed Strabonus' casque and skull, and the king's charger reared screaming, hurling a limp and sprawling corpse from the saddle. A great cry went up from the host, which faltered and gave back.
Robert E. Howard
#62. Man is still an ape in that he forgets what is not ever before his eyes.
Robert E. Howard
#63. Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.
Robert E. Howard
#64. Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.
Robert E. Howard
#67. 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.
Robert E. Howard
#68. It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.
Robert E. Howard
#69. How can I wear the harness of toil
And sweat at the daily round,
While in my soul forever
The drums of Pictdom sound?
Robert E. Howard
#70. But not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood.
Robert E. Howard
#71. not trouble his head about them; he knew that Zamora's religion, like all things of a civilized, longsettled people, was intricate and complex, and had lost most of the pristine essence in a maze of formulas and rituals.
Robert E. Howard
#72. I have no fear of the Hereafter. An orthodox hell could hardly be more torture than my life has been.
Robert E. Howard
#73. 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.
Robert E. Howard
#75. When the oceans drown the world, women will take time for jealousy.
Robert E. Howard
#76. They realize their ultimate doom, but they are fatalists, incapable of resistance or escape. Not one of the present generation has been out of sight of these walls.
Robert E. Howard
#77. For man's only weapon is courage that flinches not from the gates of Hell itself, and against such not even the legions of Hell can stand.
Robert E. Howard
#78. The wild hetman stood like a statue for a space, dimly grasping something of the cosmic tragedy of the fitful ephemera called mankind and the hooded shapes of darkness which prey upon it.
Robert E. Howard
#79. Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph
Robert E. Howard
#80. 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.
Robert E. Howard
#81. Before the invader sound was born, the Universe was silent and shall be again.
Robert E. Howard
#82. Gleaming shell of an outworn lie; fable of Right divine
You gained your crowns by heritage, but Blood was the price of mine.
The throne that I won by blood and sweat , by Crom, I will not sell
For promise of valleys filled with gold, or threat of the Halls of Hell!
Robert E. Howard
#83. Suddenly the black torturer laid down the pipes and rose, towering over the writhing white figure.
Robert E. Howard
#84. Life is but a web spun of ghosts and dreams and illusions.
Robert E. Howard
#85. Never the less, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one's lot is cast; a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe.
Robert E. Howard
#86. Civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence - whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.
Robert E. Howard
#87. I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
Robert E. Howard
#88. They take little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in death-like sleep." "Then
Robert E. Howard
#89. My body seems a mere encumbrance to me; an imbecillic wagon, hitched to the horse of desire, which is the soul.
Robert E. Howard
#90. Then, since all great poets are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved great fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I ever knew.
Robert E. Howard
#91. Men spoke of tribal war, of a gathering of vultures in the southeast, and a terrible leader who led his swiftly increasing hordes to victory.
Robert E. Howard
#92. Wits and swords are as straws against the wisdom of the Darkness ...
Robert E. Howard
#95. 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.
Robert E. Howard
#96. It was made from the black lotus, whose blossoms wave in the lost jungles of Khitai, where only the yellow-skulled priests of Yun dwell. Those blossoms strike dead any who smell of them.
Robert E. Howard
#97. I think the real reason so many youngsters are clamoring for freedom of some vague sort, is because of unrest and dissatisfaction with present conditions; I don't believe this machine age gives full satisfaction in a spiritual way, if the term may be allowed.
Robert E. Howard
#98. It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.
Robert E. Howard
#99. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.
Robert E. Howard
#100. It is an ill thing to meet a man you thought dead in the woodland at dusk.
Robert E. Howard
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