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Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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GRAMOPHONES

...you can't write literature with it, because it hasn't any ideas & it hasn't any gift for elaboration, or smartness of talk, or vigor of action, or felicity of expression, but is just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, & as grave & unsmiling as the devil. I filled four dozen cylinders in two settings, then found I could have said about as much with the pen & said it a deal better.
- letter to William Dean Howells, April 4, 1891

AI image created by Barbara Schmidt

I don't mind them away back two or three rooms, but I don't like to be close beside them when they're talking through their teeth. They never really represent the human voice, and for that reason I've always declined to talk a record into one.
- quoted in The New York Times, June 30, 1907, "Mark Twain's Experiences in the Hands of British Interviewers"

1907 gramophone ad
1907 advertisement for the gramophone

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