Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It seems to me that you are better off, as a writer and as an American, in a small town than you'd… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I am never much interested in the effects of what I write....I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my...books. Two… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
![“By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something…” quote by H. L. Mencken](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/f46/h-l-mencken-245_absolutely-nothing_by-profession-a-biologist-thomas-henry-h_5368.jpg)
