From the Man himself regarding Conan's mindset: (Italics mine)
“I don’t think you’re going to like ol’ Conan. His struggle is big, uncomplicated with civilized standards. The people who read my stuff want to get away from this modern, complicated world with its hypocrisy, its cruelty, its god-eat-dog life. They want to go back to the origin of the human race. The civilization we live in is a hell of a lot more sinister than the time I write about. In those days, girl, men were men and women were women. They struggled to stay alive, but the struggle was worth it.” pg. 63 "One Who Walked Alone"
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"Conan was as much a part of this wilderness as Balthus was alien to it. The Cimmerian might have spent years among the great cities of the world; he might have walked with the rulers of civilisation; he might even achive his wild whim some day and rule as king of a civilised nation; stranger things had happened. but he was no less a barbarian. He was concerned only with the naked fundamentals of life.
The warm intimacies of small, kindly thins, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized men's lives were meaningless to him. A wolf was no less a wolf because a whim of chance caused him to run with watchdogs. Bloodshed and violence and savagery were the natural elements of the life Conan knew; he could not, he would never, understand the little things that are so dear to civilised men and women." "Beyond the Black River"
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“All I wanted to know was what kind of comment about life does he make?” I asked. “And I want to know what kind of comment you make about life in your Conan stories.”
Bob began to talk about good and evil in life. He said that life was always a struggle between good and evil, and people like to read about that struggle. He said that even though the Conan sagas were set in a prehistoric time, Conan often faced the same kind of evil and decadence we faced today.
He said that he wasn’t about to write those psychological yarns that sophisticated, half-educated people went for. No. He wrote for readers who wanted evil to be something big, horrible, but still something a barbarian like Conan could overcome. Evil could be found in another person who was about to kill you, or it could be found in a different race of people, a witch, a ghost, or some manifestation of the supernatural.
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These damn pseudo-scientific writers of today who try to explore a man’s inner mind ain’t worth a damn. Evil, they say, lurks inside a man. I hate the damn bastards who write stuff like that, because every decent impulse a man has is given a dirty meaning by these damn sons-of-bi– guns. A man loves his poor old sick mother, and those damn bastards call it the ‘Oedipus complex.’ A doctor goes to see an attractive sick woman, and it’s portrayed as lust.” pgs. 151-152 "One Who Walked Alone"
