Mark Twain

“I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

“I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was...”

“What an ass you are!” Satan said. “Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real,...”

“But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and che...”

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the r...”

“My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”

“Write what you know.”

“Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”

“A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has...”

“Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.”

“The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in he...”

“One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.”

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize...”

“The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.”

“Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolis...”

“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the quest...”

“A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.”

“Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cu...”

“When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, di...”

“Each of us knows it all, and knows he knows it all—the rest, to a man, are fools and eluded. One man knows there is a hell, the next one knows there isn’t; one man knows monarchy is best, th...”