I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
- Mark Twain, a Biography

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.
- Is Shakespeare Dead

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.
- A petition to the Queen of England, 1887 (plea for exemption from English tax on royalties)

An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1, To tell him you have read one of his books; 2, To tell him you have read all of his books; 3, To ask him to let you read the manuscripts of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; no. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson

I never saw an author who was aware that there is any dimensional difference between a fact and a surmise.
- quoted in My Father Mark Twain, by Clara Clemens

In my list I know I should put Shakspeare; & Browning; & Carlyle (French Revolution only); Sir Thomas Malory (King Authur); Parkman's Histories (a hundred of them if there were so many); Arabian Nights; Johnson (Boswell's), because I like to see that complacent old gasometer listen to himself talk; Jowett's Plato; & "B.B." (a book which I wrote some years ago, not for publication but just for my own private reading.)

I should be sure of these; & I could add the other three -- but I should want to hold the opportunity open a few years, so as to make no mistake.

- letter to Rev. C. D. Crane, 20 January 1887

I have worked for copyright in all the different ways that its friends have suggested ever since 1872, seventeen or eighteen years, and I am cordially willing to continue to work for it all the rest of my life in all those ways but one -- but I want to draw the line there -- the platform.

We can point to an aggregate of about twelve authors' readings now, since the first attempt, but we can't point to a single one of them and say it was rationally conducted. Conducting a show is a trade. To do it well must be done by a master, not novices or apprentices. There is no master with grit enough for the place. You can't find him. He hasn't been born yet. Consider what is required of him. He must say to the small fry: 'You are allowed ten minutes of platform time; if you overpass it two minutes I shall bring down the gavel and shut you off.' To the very greatest poet he must say: 'For your own sake you are allowed but fifteen minutes; you must test your piece at home, and time it by a friend's watch, and allow for the difference between platform time and parlor time, which is three minutes. If it overpasses twelve minutes at home you must cut it down to twelve. If you try to ring in an extra piece you'll hear the gavel.' He must say to the audience: 'The performance will close at 10 o'clock whether the programme is finished or not,' and then keep his word. He must find obscurities who are willing to take the tailpieces on the plain condition that they may possibly never be called up, or notorieties who will promise that they will not answer to their names after 10 o'clock, and will honorably keep that promise.

"There is no such man alive, unless it might be General Sherman, author of the brisk and delightful personal memoirs. And even then you would have to appoint me to police him and whisper from time to time, 'General, your time's up;' for possibly you have noticed it, in no instance in history has the chairman of an authors' reading failed to add an hour to the already intolerably long bill.

No: an authors reading, conducted in the customary way, turns what ought to be the pleasantest of all entertainments into an experience to be forever remembered with bitterness by the audience. Remember Washington. There are now living but four persons who paid to get into that house; it is also a fact, howsoever privately it has been kept, that twenty-two died on the premises and eight-one on their way home. I am miserable when I think of my share in that wanton, that unprovoked massacre.

Tell me any other way that I can help the cause and I will do my level best.

- letter to Richard R. Bowker, 9 October 1889. Printed in Philadelphia Inquirer, 18 December 1889, p. 4, which reprinted the letter from the New York Sun.