
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Variant: The report of my death was an exaggeration.
from "Message from Morrissey," True To You http://true-to-you.net/morrissey_news_130131_01 (31 January 2013). Twist on a quote by Mark Twain.
In interviews etc., About life and death
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Variant: The report of my death was an exaggeration.
“Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours,
And ask them what report they bore to heaven.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night II, Line 376.
“Life and death have been lacking in my life.”
Prologue
Discussion (1932)
From a note Twain wrote in London on May 31, 1897 to reporter Frank Marshall White: Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out For the Territory : Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 134 http://books.google.com/books?id=ms3tce7BgJsC&lpg=PA134&vq=%22the%20report%20of%20my%20death%20was%20an%20exaggeration%22&pg=PA134. (The original note is the Papers of Mark Twain, Accession #6314, etc., Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va. http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=uva-sc/viu00005.xml, in Box 1.)
White subsequently reported this in "Mark Twain Amused," New York Journal, 2 June 1897. White also recounts the incident in "Mark Twain as a Newspaper Reporter," The Outlook, Vol. 96, 24 December 1910
"Chapters from My Autobiography", The North American Review, 21 September 1906, p. 160. Mark Twain
Misquote: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
This paraphrase or misquote may be more popular than the original.
Variant: I said - 'Say the report is greatly exaggerated'.
Albert-László Barabási, "The network takeover", Nature Physics (Jan., 2012)
“The importance of conventional life is greatly exaggerated and a good death can do wonders.”
An Arrow to the Heart. pg. 140. (2007). (Topic: Life)
[Television Criticism, 1412941679, Victoria O'Donnell, 2007, Sage Publications]
About
Source: Participant observer, 1994, p. 196; As cited in: Ickis (2014)
Address at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (9 June 1957).
Context: Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.