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.
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.
It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.
When I cannot stand alone, it will be time to die.
Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.
Animals are neither gods nor fiends, but men in their way without the lust and greed of man.
The people among which I lived – and yet live, mainly – made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men.
But not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood.
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.
I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.
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.
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.
What always was must always be.
One man’s bane is another’s bliss.
No man can be convinced when he will not.
I have put off the past like a worn-out cloak.
I have gone into yesterday and tomorrow and both were as real as today – which is like the dreams of ghosts!
Men are but men, and the greatest men are they who soonest learn the simpler things.
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.
I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply.
While we may open the books of the past, we may but grant flying glances of the future, through the mist that veils it.