"Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography..." - Quote by H L Mencken
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
More by H L Mencken
“A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.”
“The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.”
“Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.”
More on Autobiography
“I started smoking as soon as I went on the stage. I'd make cigars out of the Morning World when I was a kid.”
“This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.”
“an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.”
More on Literature
“I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.”
“If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero.”
“I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.”