Success Quote by Robert E. Howard

There is a brutal candor in that line, but it isn’t just self-pity; it’s a writer staring down the gap between output and recognition and deciding the gap is permanent. “Success” here isn’t defined, which is the point. For Robert E. Howard, a pulp writer churning out stories at industrial speed, success could mean money, prestige, escape from a small-town life, or simply the feeling that the work adds up to something larger than a stack of magazines. By refusing to name the metric, he admits he’s losing on all of them at once.

The sentence is engineered to sound final. “Have not been” makes failure a completed fact, not a temporary condition. “Probably” pretends at rational modesty, but it’s a thin veil over fatalism; the phrase “and probably never will be” turns the future into a foreclosed account. It reads like a private verdict delivered in public grammar.

Context sharpens the edge. Howard was writing in an era when pulp was both a lifeline and a stigma: you could be prolific and still feel disposable, paid quickly and forgotten quickly. Add the biographical reality - isolation, bouts of depression, and a life cut short - and the line starts to feel less like a mood and more like a worldview: the suspicion that the culture’s applause is rigged, and that artistic labor doesn’t guarantee artistic meaning.

The subtext is the most damning: he’s not only doubting his career; he’s doubting his right to imagine a different life. That’s what makes it sting. It’s resignation masquerading as honesty.