Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken makes productivity sound less like a virtue than a biological tic, and that’s the joke with teeth. By comparing his writing life to a hen’s egg-laying, he strips away the pieties that usually cling to “the work”: inspiration, moral mission, even self-improvement. A hen doesn’t lay eggs to “find her voice.” She lays because she’s built to. Mencken’s line turns the romantic myth of the author into something faintly mechanical, almost humiliating, and in doing so it also dares you to argue with the results.

The intent isn’t self-pity; it’s a preemptive defense against solemn interpretation. If writing is instinct, then it’s not up for negotiation with critics, censors, editors, or the era’s civic scolds. Mencken, the professional skeptic of American boosterism and moral crusades, offers a little feint: don’t ask him to justify his output as service to society. He isn’t laying eggs for the public’s breakfast. He’s laying them because stopping would be unnatural.

There’s also vanity hiding inside the deadpan. Eggs are tangible, countable, reliably produced. Mencken implies his work arrives with that same steady inevitability, a rebuke to the culture that treats art as an occasional lightning strike. In the early-20th-century churn of newspapers and magazines, when a writer’s relevance depended on keeping the press fed, the metaphor lands as both satire and survival strategy: keep laying, keep living, keep irritating the reformers.