A Quote by H. L. Mencken

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

H. L. Mencken

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Been Chicago Few Henry Improved James Novelist Vastly Would

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H. L. Mencken
American - Writer
September 12, 1880 - January 29, 1956

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Ben Lerner

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

Helen Vendler

I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.

Cynthia Ozick

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.

Philip Guedalla

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender

Philip Guedalla

There are a number of teams that would become vastly improved with Drew Bledsoe.

Al Michaels

Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know.

Andre Maurois

While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

Joseph Epstein

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do - and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time.

Ray Bradbury

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

Stephen Greenblatt

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

Joyce Carol Oates

Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.

Joyce Carol Oates

I know that James Brown recording where he sings about Chicago. I think he sings, like, 'Chicago, my hometown!' That's what I think of when I think of Chicago. And I think of Chicago Bulls.

Michiel Huisman

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

James Thurber

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.

Michael Chabon

As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy - happier - today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.

Ernest Hemingway

A Quote by H. L. Mencken

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