Collage by
Dave Thomson
My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody
drinks water.
- Notebook, 1885
High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes
water.
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 15 February 1887
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I have never tried, in even one
single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was
not equipped for it either by native gifts or training. And I never had
any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game--the masses.
I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my best
to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere. - Mark Twain, a Biography |
It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the
law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries
of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect
the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.
- Dinner speech, 8 December 1881
Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish; but Literature
and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate.
- Letter to the Millicent [Rogers] Library, 22 February 1894
Delicacy -- a sad, sad false delicacy -- robs literature of the two best things
among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 19 September 1877
Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment
for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual
snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others.
- "About Play-Acting"
I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to
deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict
was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world,
or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction
upon the world. I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent
to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to
lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or
fall by that mighty court's decision any way.
- "The Facts Concerning the Carnival of Crime in Connecticut"
No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties
of literary work.
- quoted in My Father Mark Twain, Clara Clemens
In literature imitations do not imitate.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson
Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general
elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.
- letter to Henry H. Rogers, 24 January 1899
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