"Our literature, despite several false starts that..." - Quote by H L Mencken

“Man makes love by braggadocio, and woman makes love by listening.”

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.”

“A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.”

“Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast”

“But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.”

“And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.”

“I am always talking about the human condition and about American society in particular: what it is like to be human, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on from darkness into darkness and that darkness carpeted.”

“Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.”

“This idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn't really jibe with the experience of most people.”