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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 |
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 W. D. Howells, 2/15/1887
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 12/8/1881
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, 2/22/1894
Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things
among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 9/19/1877
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 could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because
an individual's verdict [is] worthless...The great public [is] the only tribunal
competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort.
- "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
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