Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Mark TwainRead
I will now claim - until dispossesed - that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature. ... The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects- devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. ... He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Mark Twain reflects on the impact of the typewriter on his character and artistic expression.
In this quote, Mark Twain discusses his experience with the typewriter as a tool for literature. He acknowledges the device's flaws and its morally questionable effects on his character, suggesting that while he found it degrading, the machine also had a profound influence on literary creation. Twain humorously notes that while he was able to recover from its influence, his friend Howells did not, highlighting the complex relationship between technology and personal morality in the creative process.
Themes
TypewriterLiteratureMoralityTechnologyCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about the evolution of writing tools, you could use this quote to illustrate the moral implications of technology in creativity.
More from Mark Twain
All quotes →The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
Mark TwainRead
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
Mark TwainRead
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Mark TwainRead
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
Mark TwainRead
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Mark TwainRead
Similar quotes
Every photo, every 'ONCE' in time is also the beginning of a story starting 'once upon a time...' Every photo is the first frame of a movie.
Wim WendersRead
A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.
Louis KahnRead
I'm nothing else but an artist, I'm sure, and delighted to be.
Marcel DuchampRead
A painting is nothing more than light reflected from the surface of a pigment-covered canvas. But a great painter can make you see the depth, make you feel the underlying emotion, make you sense the larger world. That, too, is the power of science: to sense and convey the depth and dimensionality of nature, to glance at the surface and to divine the shape of the universe around us.
Carl SafinaRead
I'd like to be remembered as a premier singer of songs, not just a popular act of a given period.
Luther VandrossRead
When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.
Taiye SelasiRead