H. L. Mencken Quotes

Edgar Allan Poe is amazing because he was so dark. He's from Baltimore and so cynical that you can feel it when you're reading, it feels so honest.

Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.

I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

When a country is strong... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

I don't read the critics.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.

I'm an enormous fan of American literature, and especially the great novels of Larry McMurtry, 'Lonesome Dove,' Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

I never got too specialized but did like the Southern Gothic writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

I like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Richard Yates.

In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature - I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.

I'm a big Hemingway and Salinger fan.

Pedants make a great rout about criticism, as if it were a science of great depth, and required much pains and knowledge--criticism however is only the result of good sense, taste and judgment--three qualities that indeed seldom are found together, and extremely seldom in a pedant, which most critics are.

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.

I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.