Quotes About Author

As long as I can remember I have been carelessly casting myself uninvited into novels where no self-respecting novelist would have me. This literary gate-crashing of mine must be a sign of a wretched thirsting after immortality.

By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed

Nichts lässt die Erde mit größerer Sicherheit zur Hölle werden, als der Versuch des Menschen, sie seinem Himmel zu machen.

The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.

What Mencken most strongly objected to in religion was not the expression of nonsensical views—these could easily be combated by rebuttal from the other side—but the inveterate tendency of religion to seek the enforcement of its views by the power of the government.

Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.

No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic?

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises...

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Wave after wave of cats poured down from the hill as if a vent into a world of cats had been opened

I sometimes write stories. I sometimes read them. Thank you. Stories in general—not yours.

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature

It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about.

so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place to hibernate till one might really live again.

this very morning, an hour agone, he has mounted his white ass for the return journey to Vyones.

I recognized the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook, whose very absurdness had now become unutterably tragic. The