Quote

I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.

Mark Twain

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Boys
Censorship
Huck
Becomes
Allowed
Soiled
Girl
Wrote
Sawyer
Find
Access
Finn
Mind
Adults
Distressed
Always
Clean
Washed
Never
Girls
Exclusively
Youth
Toms

More quotes by Mark Twain

Image
I am dead to adverbs they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them.
Mark Twain
Image
In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously...drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.
Mark Twain
Image
Ethical man: A Christian holding four aces.
Mark Twain
Image
Not a single right is indestructible: a new might can at any time abolish it, hence, man possesses not a single permanent right. God is Might (and He is shifty, malicious, and uncertain).
Mark Twain
Image
What's the use you learning to do right , when it's troublesome to do right and it ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?
Mark Twain
Image
Low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can't support the play by itself.
Mark Twain
Image
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
Image
A jay hasnt got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.
Mark Twain
Image
It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.
Mark Twain
Image
I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.
Mark Twain
Image
Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
Mark Twain
Image
There's always a hole in theories somewhere if you look close enough.
Mark Twain
Image
...there isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.
Mark Twain
Image
If I cannot smoke in heaven, then I shall not go.
Mark Twain
Image
When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.
Mark Twain
Image
The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.
Mark Twain
Image
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
Image
It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.
Mark Twain
Image
By trampling upon the helpless abroad with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.
Mark Twain
Image
Most of the things I worried about in life never happened.
Mark Twain