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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

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Mark Twain
Age: 74 †
Born: 1835
Born: November 30
Died: 1910
Died: April 21
Aphorist
Author
Autobiographer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Teacher
Florida
Missouri
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Samuel L. Clemens
Samuel Clemens
Possible
Fail
Character
Characters
Care
Succeed
Together
Failing
Writing
Fiction
Something
Hell
Test
Good
Trouble
Quickly
Land
Tests

More quotes by Mark Twain

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No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.
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If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
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Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.
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Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts?... Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity.
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All our acts, reasoned and unreasoned, are selfish
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Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles
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We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.
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It's my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn't like to ask. I know I have. But I'd rather teach them than practice them any day. Give them to others-that's my motto.
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Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.
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Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave.
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Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.
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There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work.
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A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
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The introduction of homeopathy forced the old school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business. You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths to destroy it.
Mark Twain
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This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back - I get glimpses of them in the mirror - and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography.
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A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.
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And how moving is the eloquence of the untaught when it is the heart that is speaking!
Mark Twain
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A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt
Mark Twain
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Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.
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When the world is made to be idiot-proof, the world will become overpopulated with idiots.
Mark Twain