Quotes & Sayings About Mark Twain Writing

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries. — Mark Twain

If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller. — Val Kilmer

Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ... — Kurt Vonnegut

I am trying to get the hang of this new fangled writing machine, but I am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the first attempt I have ever made & yet I perceive I shall soon & easily acquire a fine facility in its use ... The machine has several virtues. I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around. Of course it saves paper. — Mark Twain

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 composition just by itself ... Anybody can have ideas
the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. — Mark Twain

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. — Mark Twain

If Mark Twain had had Twitter, he would have been amazing at it. But he probably wouldn't have gotten around to writing Huckleberry Finn. — Andy Borowitz

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation. — Mark Twain

In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm. — Mark Twain

Use the right word, not its second cousin. — Mark Twain

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it. — Mark Twain

Men write many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man has a voice, brutal laws are impossible — Mark Twain

It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off. — Mark Twain

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes. — Mark Twain

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 hell together, as quickly as possible. — Mark Twain

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay. — Mark Twain

Don't look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it. — Mark Twain

Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it ... — Mark Twain

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream. — Mark Twain

Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice! — Mark Twain

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written
it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself. — Mark Twain

Do I want you to write to me? Indeed I do.... The others break my heart, but you will not. You a something divine in you that is not in other men. You have the touch that heals, not lacerates. And you know the secret places of our hearts... You have seen our whole voyage... [Y]ou see us not, chartless, adrift - derelicts. — Peter Messent

Write what you know. — Mark Twain

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by. — Mark Twain

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. — Mark Twain

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 no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No
that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times. — Mark Twain

And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't. — Jennifer Donnelly

If ever you've been down in the dumps, hear these iconic authors share with you more than their writing wisdom. — Mark Twain

If we learned to walk and talk the way we learn to read and write, everyone would limp and stutter. — Mark Twain

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well. — Mark Twain

Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new. — Mark Twain

Eschew surplusage. — Mark Twain

If I'd seen a playwright ever write an' play at the same time, I'd have given 'em more of a chance at cards. Can I get an 'amen?' — Mark Twain

Writing is the easiest thing in the world ... Just try it sometime. I sit up with a pipe in my mouth and a board on my knees and I scribble away. — Mark Twain

To whatever extent the Hell's Angels may or may be latent sadomasochists or repressed homosexuals is to me
after nearly a year in the constant company of outlaw motorcyclists
almost entirely irrelevant. There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery. It is a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quarterlies, but it won't change a word of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors ... but he was a great matador, and it is hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the reality of the thing he did best. — Hunter S. Thompson

A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur. — Mark Twain

Mark Twain on George Ade's writing: I have been reading him [Ade] again, and my admiration overflows all limits. How effortless the limning! It is as if the work did itself, without help of the master's hand. — George Ade

We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print. — Mark Twain

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 reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone. — Mark Twain

Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday. — Mark Twain

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 once so rich! ... Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night
and it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here
writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzling the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery. Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today? — Mark Twain

Tom found himself writing "BECKY" in the sand with his big toe; he scratched it out, and was angry with himself for his weakness. But he wrote it again, nevertheless; he could not help it. — Mark Twain

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style. — Mark Twain

When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself. — Mark Twain

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. — Mark Twain

The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing. — Mark Twain

Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down
he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down. — Mark Twain

Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect. — Mark Twain

When you catch an adjective, kill it. — Mark Twain

A young mark twain on the make: I can't turn in inkstand into Aladdin's lamp. — H.W. Brands

As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out. — Mark Twain

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half ... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop ... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen. — Mark Twain

LEARN FROM THE MASTERS:
Mark Twain once said, "Show, don't tell." This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like "Show, don't tell." Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic. — Colin Nissan

There ain't nothing more to write about and I'm rotten glad of it, because if I'd know'd what trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn't a tackled it. — Mark Twain

In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience. — Mark Twain

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. — Mark Twain

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke. — Mark Twain

I don't speak German well but several experts have assured me that I write it like an angel. Maybe so, maybe so- I don't know. I've not yet made any acquaintances among the angels. That comes later, whenever it please the Deity. I'm not in any hurry. — Mark Twain

Perfect grammar
persistent, continuous, sustained
is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it. — Mark Twain

I've always liked the classic "young adult" writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens. They write so clearly, and they know how to entertain. — Arthur Bradford

The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say. — Mark Twain

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules. — Mark Twain

Ah
Ferguson
what
what did you say was the name of the party who wrote this?" "Christopher Colombo! ze great Christopher Colombo!" Another deliberate examination. "Ah
did he write it himself; or
or how?" "He write it himself!
Christopher Colombo! He's own hand-writing, write by himself!" Then the doctor laid the document down and said: "Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could write better than that. — Mark Twain

Well, my book is written-let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can't ever be said. And besides, they would require a library-and a pen warmed up in hell. — Mark Twain

It is a good thing to write for the amusement of the public, but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction, their profit, their actual and tangible benefit. — Mark Twain

God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. — Mark Twain

I don't have time to write you a short letter, so I'm writing you a long one instead. — Mark Twain

No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done. — Mark Twain

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience. — Mark Twain

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades. — Mark Twain

That cat will write her autograph all over your leg if you let her. — Mark Twain

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. — Mark Twain

A lot of novelists start late - Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter. — James M. Cain

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one. — Mark Twain

If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will. — Mark Twain

It is not well, when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry down too close to your own time - it is safest to speak only vaguely of your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I now do. I was born without teeth - and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest. But — Mark Twain

It smells terrible in here.'
Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate. — John Kennedy Toole

When an honest writer discovers an imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence. — Mark Twain

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them
then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart. — Mark Twain