Mark Twain Quotes

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.

Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.

I've been enjoying 'Life on the Mississippi' by Mark Twain that I picked up at the airport randomly. It's very witty and interesting to read about his time as a steamboat pilot.

[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.

Mark Twain gave us an insight into the life on the Mississippi at the turn of the century.

My mum was never too keen on TV, so we kids all went to the library and got books out. Right from the start, I loved the works of Mark Twain. Every time I read about Tom Sawyer, I'd go out and do something low-level naughty, just like him.

Mark Twain is as big as America. He really is.

Mark Twain cannot be defined.

Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

I liked Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and that is the kind of character that I would like to have played. That would have been more in tune with who I really was.

I first read 'Tom Sawyer' when I was in 8th grade, 13 years old. I realised since that Mark Twain just bottled what it felt like to be a child.

Hillary has her work cut out for her. Her Democratic challengers are a 'Who's Who' of 'who's that?' Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee, Silas Phelps, Peter Wilks... now those last two were characters from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. You didn't even notice, did you?

I would not wear any clothes that had a brand name on them, and I only read books that were canonical.

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.

I get so annoyed by famous people who have not actually written the books they slap their names on.

Nobody ever recognizes themselves unless they are not the character. There are many people who have claimed to be in my books, but unfortunately they were usually people that I didn't know.

In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.

[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.

I've never lived in a building without my name on it.

How do you know I wouldn't have just been happy with the truth? I don’t care if my father was a deadbeat named Butternut. It doesn't change anything right now.” “His name wasn't really Butternut, was it?” Gansey asked Adam in a low voice.

But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.

My inspiration is life. My family, my friends, travelling, books, music, love, food, fashion. What inspires you?