
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Variant: The report of my death was an exaggeration.
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'.
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Variant: The report of my death was an exaggeration.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)
Source: Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, 1988, p. 182
“Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.”
A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding
“Yes, well I had all my serious illnesses in late middle age. And now I'm just stuck, I'm afraid.”
As quoted in "V.S. Pritchett's Century" (1990) by Martin Amis; later included in Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993) by Martin Amis, p. 265
“It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.”
Of roast mutton served to him at an inn, June 3, 1784, p. 535
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol IV
“There are two sorts of ill-breeding”
Sec. 141
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: The next good quality belonging to a gentleman, is good breeding [manners]. There are two sorts of ill-breeding: the one a sheepish bashfulness, and the other a mis-becoming negligence and disrespect in our carriage; both of which are avoided by duly observing this one rule, not to think meanly of ourselves, and not to think meanly of others.