Mark Twain Quotes

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

I've always enjoyed writing, I graduated with a degree in English; I've done bits of journalism.

I wish we lived in the days when you could challenge a person to a duel!

I see in our relation with the [Austrian] Bund an error of Prussia's which, sooner or later, we shall have to repair ferro et igni ["sword and fire"], unless we take advantage betimes of a favorable season to employ a healing remedy [i.e. war] against it.

The long war of words and writing ends in blows.

… from humanity to nationality to bestiality

There was no secrecy about the ambitions of the Nazis. The Nazis themselves advertised them in innumerable books and pamphlets, and in every issue of their numerous newspapers and periodicals. Nobody can reproach the Nazis with having concocted their plots clandestinely. He who had ears to hear and eyes to see could not help but know all about their aspirations.

Herr Burgermeister. What is the good of your speeches? I come to Sarajevo on a friendly visit and someone throws a bomb at me. This is outrageous!

God grant us a war.

I really like violence in writing and films.

Never throw up on an editor.

The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.

Editors, for the most part, don't care ''what'' you've done, or how astounding the physical event may have been. You need to write well. Many others are capable of doing what you have done (probably), so you must write better than they.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

First rule, stick them with the pointy end!

I was a very violent kid. I think movies and writing and art have been a way of channeling this. But I have will to defend people - it can be all sorts of people.

Take your hands off her, Sinclair told the guy behind me, Or they'll write books about what I'll do to you.

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

As will so often be the case when a men has a pen in his hand. It is like a club or sledge-hammer, - in using which, either for defence or attack, a man can hardly measure the strength of the blows he gives.

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism.

He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.

The reason I've gotten into script-writing, which was accidental to begin with, was that I found it was a far more effective medium for violence. Which is something that I'd always written in songs, but the violence always sat strangely within a song. And I was always interested in the way in which you listen to murder ballads and things like that - these weird lines would kind of come out, like, I drug her by the hair or something - that sat weirdly in the song. Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.