H. L. Mencken Quotes About Writing

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Dull, Subjects

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Blow, Trying

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Discovery, Joy

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

• No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me--has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has any one ever lost public office thereby. 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 folly. They dislike ideas, for ideas make them uncomfortable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Education, Running, Mistake

  Chicago Tribune, 19 Sept. 1926.

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Moon, Thinking

• 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."

  H. L. Mencken

  Jobs, Work, Writing

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Happiness, Writing, Men

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

• Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.

  H. L. Mencken

  Success, Crazy, Book

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Artist, Men

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

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Funny, Book, Writing

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Order, Giving

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Determination, Writing

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  War, Writing, Character

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

• The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Strong, Hate

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Giving, Feelings

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

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Ideas, Psychics

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Eggs, Hens

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Giving, Doe

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Men, Critics

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Writing, Two

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Men, Liberty

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Men, Genius

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

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Sex, Dirty, Writing

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

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Mistake, Writing

You May Also Like:

George Jean Nathan

Friedrich Nietzsche

Mark Twain

Clarence Darrow

Sinclair Lewis

Ambrose Bierce

John T. Scopes