“Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”

“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.”

“I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.”

“Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night.”

“Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

“If my name were Mark Twain, I’d write under the pseudonym “Samuel Clemens.”