“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 sellFor promise of valleys filled with gold, or threat of the Halls of Hell!”

“How can I wear the harness of toilAnd sweat at the daily round,While in my soul foreverThe drums of Pictdom sound?”

“The little poets sing of little things:Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings;Lovers who kissed and then were made as one,And modest flowers waving in the sun.The mighty poets write in blood and tearsAnd agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.They reach their mad blind hands into the night,To plumb abysses dead to human sight;To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world. MUSINGS [click on the thumbnail by Jack "King" Kirby]”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!”