(1835–1910)
U.S. writer and humorist
Mark Twain
When you catch an adjective, kill it.
Letter to David Watt Bowser, 20 March 1880; via the Mark Twain Project
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 221.
I know the look of green apples and peaches and pears on the trees, and I know how entertaining they are when they are inside of a person.
Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 217.
We attended the school with more or less regularity once or twice a week, in summer, walking to it in the cool of the mornings by the forest paths, and back in the gloaming at the end of the day. All the pupils brought their dinners in baskets—corn dodger, buttermilk and other good things—and sat in the shade of the trees at noon and ate them. It is the part of my education which I look back upon with the most satisfaction.
Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, vol 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 216.
No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor.
“Concerning the Interview,” 10-page handwritten essay, Mark Twain Project, University of California, Berkeley.