H. L. Mencken Quotes

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They're much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

The pattern of a newspaperman's life is like the plot of 'Black Beauty.' Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.

The song 'Take This Job and Shove It' spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites.

The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

It is in another world. In the midst of so much wealth there seems to nothing but chimneys and flaring furnaces with wretched cottages around them. Add to this a thick and black atmosphere and you have but a first impression of the life a third of my subjects are forced to live.

When huge factories were established there could no longer be a close tie between the master and his men; the workman hated his employer, and the employer looked on his workmen simply as hands.

Ten cents a day is adequate pay for a workingman.

[Making music] only turned into this weird job in the last year or so. Once I figured that out, I was having a blast.

Acting becomes my real job, writing becomes my second job, and then when I turn 50, I think I'm going to open up an interior decorating company.

But what makes wage slaves? Wages!

I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That's not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be.

In polite society, there is such a thing as sensitivity to some issues, as time has gone on. There was a time when we weren't politically correct, at all, and we all wince at moments when we look to the past and see that. I don't really know what the answer is, as far as that is concerned. However, me, as an artist, I don't really think about it, at all. It actually is not my job to think about that, especially in terms of me, as a writer, but also as a filmmaker. I'm not worried about the filmmaking part because, if I'm writing it, that's what I'm going to do.

You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

When I first started writing, a friend said I should be careful because I'm letting people know how to reach right in and play with my workings. And they do!

The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day

You say, Wait a minute, God, you spared me from a slave job in an office, and now I have a slave job onstage. I am not on that clock no more.

If you hate your job, don't worry, you won't have it for long.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.

My dream is to do exactly what I'm doing. I love writing and directing, and being somebody that can write about an artist I love or make a film about it. That's great. I would leave the other stuff to those who do it much better.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.