H. L. Mencken Quotes

Most people don't find their creativity. There are more unsung geniuses that don't even know they have great talent.

Everybody's an artist. Unfortunately we don't treat them as such.

I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they're being edited out of importance.

Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.

I can't deny that label-support gave me a leg up - though not every successful artist needs it.

A singer can quit once he or she has made ten great songs; a director can finish once he or she has made five amazing films; a writer just needs to write three great books.

Lost in a crowd of greats, not a single Oscar. That's showbiz.

Before 'Lord of the Rings,' some people would have just classed Peter Jackson as a horror director. But there is a mind there.

I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered--either by themselves or by others.

If anything can be art, then anyone can be an artist.

Take Tom Sachs as an artist. His brain is more brilliant than anything, so of course, anything he puts out over a ten-year period is going to continue to be super relevant. But if you look at some artists, they have one good idea, but unless you know where it's coming from, it's not going to be lasting.

The draining away of James Baldwin's magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-three.

The best of any artist is in their art.

Generally, there's a correlation between good work and good reviews. In the very odd, very rare case that they say it's terrible, but actually you're a genius who is ahead of your time, you are going to just have to suffer.

Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist *can* come from *anywhere*.

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess.

It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.

Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.

He [Michael Cimino] wasn't the typical filmmaker. I don't know if he had more in him, he certainly had a lot of scripts. I know he wrote a hell of a lot.

Englands genius filled all measureOf heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,Gave to the mind its emperor,And life was larger than before:Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of Shakespeares wit. The men who lived with him becamePoets, for the air was fame.