America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.

Jaron Lanier

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.

Aleksandar Hemon

Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's 'Time's Arrow' wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then.

Anthony Doerr

Every Shania Twain interview ends with someone asking, 'Which Beatles album have you always wanted to cover, given the chance?'

Antony Johnston

Someone asked why I invited Jon Stewart to be the first guest on the 'Journal''s premiere in 2007. 'Because Mark Twain isn't available,' I answered. I was serious.

Bill Moyers

Mark Twain gave us an insight into the life on the Mississippi at the turn of the century.

Bob Newhart

The first album I owned was probably a Backstreet Boys album, and shortly after was Shania Twain.

Cassadee Pope

I was writing waltzes at a time when the most popular thing was Shania Twain and the very pop edge of country. I didn't really know how to do much of that.

Chris Stapleton

Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

Chuck Jones

I've had to stop going to the nearest grocery store that seems to play Shania Twain's 'Forever and For Always' whenever I'm there. It's hard to shop for frozen entrees through cold-air blasted tears. Feels good on a flushed face though.

David Berman

When I was a young child and before he had left us for the U.S., my father would give me Mark Twain novels. In the characters, the weather and the context, my father must have seen many parallels to his own youth in the Caribbean in the 1930s and 40s.

David Lammy

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

Debbie Macomber

Bob Hope, like Mark Twain, had a sense of humor that was uniquely American, and like Twain, we'll likely not see another like him.

Dick Van Dyke

I am built funny. Picture Mark Twain's head on Ichabod Crane's body. Now hold your mental picture to the light and crumple it.

Donald McCaig

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Ernest Hemingway

Shania Twain brought a whole other fan base to country music with her sound, the way the videos were produced.

Faith Hill

Lincoln was the Twain of our politics.

Fred Kaplan

Lift others and yourself as you rise above this mess of comparison. Thank God for those who embraced their true selves and gave us gifts that only they could give: from Steve Jobs to Michael Jackson to Ray Charles to Mark Twain. There are so many more, and the list goes on.

Grace Gealey

You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.

Hal Holbrook

Mark Twain cannot be defined.

Hal Holbrook

Those who have heard me speak from time to time know that quite often I cite the observation of that great American author, Mark Twain, who said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

J. D. Hayworth