"The truth is . . . that..." - Quote by H L Mencken

“A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.”

“To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom.”

“Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.”

“What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.”

“In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say.”

“The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects - nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs - ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I'm most happy to be a writer.”

“Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.”

“I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.”

“A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.”