H. L. Mencken Quotes

I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

Beethoven was just music, and it didn't matter if he could hear it or not - he could feel it. He could hear it in his mind. He could write it down hearing it in his mind. He was just music. Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers of all times.

Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison - each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I'm active - I like playing football, but I'm not very good. I like running, but I'm not really fast.

If they had Mozart today, they couldn't work with him, although he was a very adaptable man.

If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.

If they're not temperamental, I don't want them. It's in the nature of a great artist to be that way.

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

I enjoy going on hikes, and I enjoy the occasional yoga. The one thing I'm good at athletically - and I don't know if I'm good at it anymore because I haven't done this in a while - I can throw a pretty good spiral in football, but I have no idea how to play.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

I definitely feel like I'm more of an artist than an athlete. But I'm good at both.

I think if I tried very hard, I could do a novel or a play, a poem. I could possibly paint a picture, but I know I can't write music. And still, it is the most accessible of all arts, as you know when you hear a tune.

Looking back on it now, I felt that I was blessed much like the masters, I guess - the guys who wrote the concertos.

Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.

I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art.

Some people think a song without words isn't a real song. Tell that to Beethoven and he'll kick your ass!

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.

Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

[Rubinstein was] a fountain from which music spouted, not a recitalist.