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H. L. Mencken Quotes about Writing

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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an

The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

Running, Mistake, Writing

Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.

Writing, Eggs, Hens

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

Writing, Dull, Subjects

There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

Writing, Discovery, Joy

H.L. Mencken (1917). “A book of prefaces”, p.85, Рипол Классик

The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.

Writing, Men, Liberty

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Writing, Moon, Thinking

Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.

Art, Determination, Writing

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

Writing, Blow, Trying

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

Writing, Artist, Men

H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.525, Vintage

Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.

Writing, Awkward, Sodium

H.L. Mencken (1917). “A book of prefaces”, p.86, Рипол Классик

The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.

Running, Art, Writing

H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.27, Knopf

I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Writing, Giving, Feelings

"For the Defense Written for the Associated Press, for use in my obituary" by H. L. Mencken, November 20, 1940.

Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.

Writing, Newspapers, Controversy

I am never much interested in the effects of what I write....I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my...books. Two times out of three I know something about the reviewer, and in very few cases have I any respect for his judgments. Thus his praise, if he praises me, leaves me unmoved. I can't recall any review that has even influenced me in the slightest. I live in sort of a vacuum, and I suspect that most other writers do, too. It is hard to imagine one of the great ones paying any serious attention to contemporary opinion.

Book, Writing, Two

A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.

Writing, Men, Critics

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Funny, Book, Writing

The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius.

Writing, Men, Genius

H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

Happiness, Writing, Men

H.L. Mencken (1917). “A book of prefaces”, p.85, Рипол Классик

What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.

War, Writing, Character

H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.173, Vintage

It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.

Sex, Dirty, Writing

H.L. Mencken (2013). “Second Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.195, Vintage

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Writing, Order, Giving

The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.

Writing, Ideas, Psychics

Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another "Rosenkavailer."

Jobs, Work, Writing

Writing does for me what giving milk does for a cow.

Writing, Giving, Doe

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