Often misattributed to Twain, this is actually by Blaise Pascal, "Lettres provinciales", letter 16, 1657:
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
Translation: I have only made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the opportunity to make it shorter.
Misattributed
Source: The Provincial Letters
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
Les Provinciales
Source: The Provincial Letters
“I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.”
1960s, (1963)
“If I had done nothing else in India I have written my name here, and the letters are a living joy.”
Letter to Mrs Curzon (4 April 1905) on his restoration of the Taj Mahal, quoted in David Gilmour, ‘ Curzon, George Nathaniel, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32680’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011, accessed 1 Feb 2014.
“A lot of times I wonder what Adam would have written songs about. -Appalachian Melody.”
Liner Notes
Interview with Nigel Farndale, "The talented Mr. Hockney," The Telegraph, (15 November 2001)
2000s
Context: He [Hockney's father] hardly ever left Bradford. He was a member of CND and a socialist with a rather romantic and naive idea of what Soviet Russia was like, all cornfields and ballet. He would have gone mad for email because he was always sending letters to world leaders — Eisenhower, Mao, Stalin — telling them what was what. I think he imagined the Politburo would hold up his letter and say, "Hold everything, Kenneth Hockney has written again!"
Variant: Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.
Letter to his literary agent, found on his desk after his death in 1968
Writers at Work (1977)
On his university experience, in a discussion thread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzfrRhB4Q7YgCW3f6/college-selection-advice#PuZtQ3excyvoPZh42 on LessWrong, March 2011
Context: Here's my experience. I applied to just MIT and my state university (University of Washington). I got on MIT's waiting list but was ultimately not accepted, so went to UW. I would certainly have gone to MIT had I been accepted, but my thinking now is that if I did that, I would not have had enough free time in college to write Crypto++ and think about anonymous protocols, Tegmark's multiverse, anthropic reasoning, etc., and these spare-time efforts have probably done more for my "career" than the MIT name or what I might have learned there.
“Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?”
Source: The Secret Life of Bees
