Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert E. Howard

Making a living by writing sounds romantic until you drop it into Robert E. Howard's world: oil-boom Texas towns, hard labor, cash-in-hand practicality, and a social ethic that treated “real work” as something you could point to, lift, fix, or sell. In that “hardy environment,” the writer is a kind of friendly fraud, a man whose product is invisible until it suddenly isn’t. Howard’s line gets its charge from that clash: imagination as an occupation inside a culture built to distrust anything that can’t be measured in sweat.

The phrasing does double duty. “Fantastic” isn’t just “unlikely”; it’s genre language, the word you’d use for dragons and sorcerers. Howard, the pulp architect of Conan’s muscular realities, quietly admits that his own career felt like one of his improbabilities. The subtext is a lifetime of being out of place: he isn’t merely describing how others saw him, but how thoroughly that suspicion seeped into his own self-perception. “Even today” turns the sentence into a confession of lingering impostor syndrome before we had a name for it.

There’s context here beyond personal psychology. Howard wrote in the pulp economy, where speed and volume mattered, and legitimacy was always precarious. He’s not claiming martyrdom; he’s recording how cultural capital is allocated. In a community that prizes toughness, the act of sitting alone and making worlds can feel like cheating fate. His unease becomes a subtle portrait of modern creativity: paid in checks, haunted by the fear it isn’t quite real.