Literary Birthday – 22 January – Robert E. Howard

Seven Quotes

1. It is only the promise of death that makes life worth living.
2. Man is better without knowledge of things to come, for what is to be will be, and man can neither avert nor hasten. It is better to go in the dark when the road must pass a lion and there is no other road.
3. Want will make a rogue of any man.
4. Time, place, and space are illusions, having no existence save in the mind of man which must set limits and bounds in order to understand.
5. The more I see of what you call civilisation, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!
6. 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 civilisation and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.
7. 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 was an American short story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote pulp fiction in a variety of genres and is well known for his character Conan the Barbarian, first seen in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. He is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery sub-genre of Fantasy fiction.

Image  Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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