| ...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 advertisement
for the gramophone
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