"If someone asks you where you get your characters... and they're sure to do that... you always say, "He's a combination of a lot of people I have known." That way, if your character is a damn fool, nobody will want to identify with him... To tell the truth, I don't know how a man gets a character for a story, anymore than I know how he falls in love. I don't know if his characters spring full-blown from his head, or if he sees a man walking down the street and recognises him instantly... I doubt any writer knows for sure where his characters come from."
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Fantasy authorsNovelists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesConan the Barbarian
Original Language: English
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Comment made to Novalyne Price. One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis, pp. 78–79
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard
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Robert E. Howard
Robert Ervin Howard (22 January 1906 – 11 June 1936) was an American writer of fantasy and historical adventure pulp stories, published primarily in Weird Tales magazine in the 1930s.
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