Quotes About Twain

The brilliant liberal Mark Twain had his number. He called Roosevelt "far and away the worst President we have ever had." Of course, this was before Woodrow Wilson had his turn.

A great deal was riding on this argument for Twain, for if the man from Stratford had indeed written the plays, Twain's mostly deeply held beliefs about the nature of fiction and on how major writers drew on personal experience would be wrong.

what led Twain to this conclusion: a conviction that great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical.

Two is my number as well, Lady Balmain.

Being made merely in the image of God but not otherwise resembling him enough to be mistaken by anybody but a very near sighted person.

Bob Hope, like Mark Twain, had a sense of humor that was uniquely American, and like Twain, we'll likely not see another like him.

That cat will write her autograph all over your leg if you let her.

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling's world within a world; Twain's slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

I must become a borrower of the nightFor a dark hour or twain.

Heaven for the weather and Hell for the company." "Who said that?" "Mark Twain.

Churchill, Twain said, 'knew all about war and nothing about peace'. Twain added that he himself disapproved of the war in South Africa, 'and he thought England sinned when she interfered with the Boers, as the United States is sinning in meddling in the affairs of the Filipinos. England and America were kin in almost everything; now they are kin in sin.

We were good boys, good Presbyterian boys, and loyal and all that; anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold.

Bob Hope, like Mark Twain, had a sense of humor that was uniquely American, and like Twain, we'll likely not see another like him.

Seven months after Grant's death, Julia received a whopping $200,000 check from Twain and $450,000 in the end—an astonishing sum for book royalties at the time. No previous book had ever sold so many copies in such a short period of time, and it rivaled that other literary sensation of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Clearly Grant had emerged victorious in his last uphill battle.

Always on good terms with Rockefeller, Twain thought he deserved a fair hearing from the press and was sure he would make a good impression on the publishers.

Incorrectly, many critics see the target as the text itself, when frequently the parody champions the cause of the religious text. Twain adheres to the genre in order to create a parody of it, frequently making the original the "hero of the parody," in Bakhtin's words. p.5

One can only say this: Calvinism is the order "left standing" in Twains' literary life and he respond on the level of form and content to the ideas found in that stern tradition. p.191

The streets of hell are paved with good intentions.

Those who have heard me speak from time to time know that quite often I cite the observation of that great American author, Mark Twain, who said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Golden rule: Made of hard metal so it could stand severe wear, it not being known at that time that butter would answer.

Being made merely in the image of God but not otherwise resembling him enough to be mistaken by anybody but a very near sighted person.

This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth--ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there! - Letter to J. H. Twichell, 1/29/1901

Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can't cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?

It is a public journal; I will explain what that is, another time. It is not cloth, it is made of paper; some time I will explain what paper is.  The lines on it are reading matter; and not written by hand, but printed; by and by I will explain what printing is. A thousand of these sheets have been made, all exactly like this, in every minute detail — they can't be told apart.