Celebrating Mark Twain's Birthday with His Words of Wisdom (and Humour)

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Hailed as the Father of American Literature by William Faulkner, Twain is the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a "Great American Novel" because it accurately represented the United States at the time it was written.

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which served as the setting of many of his books. When he was young, he worked as a typesetter for a magazine before he discovered he was good at writing humour (we may read The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County). Twain liked to make fun of people in the upper classes. He was the first author to use American dialect – the way Americans speak – and humour.

Twain was born on November 30, 1835 during a visit by Halley's Comet, which can be seen from Earth every 75 to 76 years. Twain predicted that he would die when Halley's Comet came back, and he was right! He died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet returned.

To celebrate his birthday, here are some of Mark Twain's best quotes:

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"If you always tell truth, you don't have to remember anything."

"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read."

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

"Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest."

"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."

"Kindness is the language which the deaf can see and the blind can see."

"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try cheer somebody else up."

"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company." 

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." 

Happy Birthday Fyodor Dostoevsky!

To live without hope is to cease to live. 

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ever since we started celebrating the birthdays of beloved authors like Roald Dahl, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Shel Silverstein and T. S. Eliot in my "Famous Author Birthday" series, I've been waiting for November 11. Today, we get to celebrate the birthday of one of my all time favourite authors – Fyodor Dostoevsky. Please join me in wishing him a very С Днем Рождения (happy birthday in Russian)!

Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11, 1821 – 9 February, 1881) was a Russian author, essayist and philosopher. His most famous works include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, all of which are amongst some of my favourite books.

Dostoevsky, along with Leo Tolstoy, is considered one of the greatest authors of the Golden Age of Russian literature. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages! Not only that, he has influenced a lot – and I mean a lot – of writers, philosophers, scientists and psychologists. Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anton Chekhov, Herman Hesse, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Vonnegut (who incidentally shares the same birthday – happy birthday Kurt Vonnegut!) are all fans of his work!

Dostoevsky's notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky's novels are often very complex, and his characters very dark. He joined a lot of different points of views and voices together to explore many deep themes including religion, guilt, dreams, emotions, visions and human nature. To give an example, the picture to the left is his notes for one chapter of The Brothers Karamzov. His works encompass so many ideas and themes that I will leave it up to him to do the explaining himself with a quote.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

Dostoevsky was the reason I fell in love with Russian literature, and I hope that one day you, my students, will get the chance to read at least one of his books and feel for yourself what a mind-blowing experience it really is! To conclude, here is some advice from the very wise man himself:

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to live.

– The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

P.S. To find out more about our Kurt Vonnegut, our other birthday boy, the Huffington Post wrote a wonderful post about what Vonnegut can teach us about life.

Rest In Peace, Tom Clancy

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

– Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy, one of America's most successful espionage and military novel authors, died on Tuesday October 1 in a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He was 66.

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Tom Clancy is best known for his complex and detailed spy and military novels, 17 of which have made it to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. He is the creator of the Jack Ryan series, which has been adapted into four films – The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears – with a fifth one on the way. Actors Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck appeared as the titular character Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst, in the films. The upcoming film is titled Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and features Chris Pine (Captain Kirk from Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness) as Jack Ryan.

Tom Clancy also co-founded Red Storm Entertainment, a video game development company that was later purchased by Ubisoft Entertainment. His next book Command Authority is set to be published in December this year.

According to the New York Times, when Tom Clancy was growing up, he didn't read much children's literature (like we are doing in our classes). Instead, he was obsessed with naval history, reading lots and lots of military and engineering books about submarine warfare, espionage, missile systems and secret plans between countries. He aspired to join the military but found his eyesight wasn't good enough. Besides looking all cool and military-esque with his aviators in the photo below, he did end up doing what he loved despite not joining the military, because he believed that...

The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read.

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Happy Birthday Old Possum!

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

– T.S. Eliot

Continuing the theme of famous author birthdays (It's just never ending this week...), September 26 is the birthday of American/British poet T. S. Eliot, who would have turned 125!

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Even though Tom Eliot is often hailed as "one of the twentieth century's major poets," he did not have to write a lot of poems to achieve this status. He believed that the only thing that mattered is that his poems were "perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."

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The poem that made him famous is called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. After that, he wrote his most famous work The Waste Land. The famous quotes "April is the cruellest month" and "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" come from this poem. He is also the poet behind The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets.


Later on in his life, he wrote the book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats for his godchildren (Eliot did not have any children of his own). In this book, he used the name "Old Possum" because it was the nickname that his good friend, editor and fellow poet Ezra Pound gave him. Although you may not have heard of this book of cat poems, chances are you have heard of the musical in which people jump around the stage in cat costumes. Yep, the Broadway musical Cats was inspired by this book!

To conclude this post, here are some lovely quotes from Old Possum himself:

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Happy Birthday William Faulkner & Shel Silverstein!

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There's no shortage of famous author birthdays this week. Besides F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on September 23, September 25 is the birthday of American authors William Faulkner and Shel Silverstein.

Faulkner, who was born in 1897, won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 for his "powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel" and is most famous for the books The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. 

Like Fitzgerald, Faulkner also had a lot to say about writing. Here are some of the best quotes about how to be a writer from an article published in the Huffington Post for his birthday. 

The best writers are insatiable 

Ninety-nine percent talent... ninety-nine percent discipline... ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

A writer must be a reader 

Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window. 

Shel Silverstein, who you may also know as Uncle Shelby, was also born on September 25, but in 1930. To celebrate Shel Silverstein's birthday, here is a video of him narrating his most famous book, The Giving Tree, in 1973.

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Great Writing

Just last week we celebrated our beloved Roald Dahl's birthday. This week, it's American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday. Born on September 24, 1896, F. Scott Fitzgerald is often considered one of the greatest American writers in the 20th Century. He is the known for Tender is the Night, The Beautiful and the Damned, the short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and his most famous work, The Great Gatsby, which was recently made into a film.

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He wrote most of his greatest work during the 1920s, a period he coined as "The Jazz Age". As depicted in the film Midnight in Paris, during the twenties, he frequently visited Paris with his wife Zelda and became good friends with fellow American author Ernest Hemingway. 

To celebrate F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday, blogger Maria Popova dug up some letters written by F. Scott Fitzgerald to a family friend and his daughter, Scottie, that offer some advice about what makes great writing.

Here are some excerpts from his letters, for all my aspiring student writers:

"You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the techniques which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell . . . [Literature] is one of those professions that wants the 'works.' You wouldn't be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave."

– Letter to Frances, November 9, 1938

"Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter – as indissolubly as if they were conceived together."

– Letter to Scottie, October 20, 1936

Roald Dahl's Birthday & Life Lessons From His Novels

Last Friday (September 13) was the birthday of one of my and I know many of your all time favourite authors – Roald Dahl. He would have turned 97!

The Huffington Post published a piece wishing him a happy birthday with a list of eleven things that we can learn from his novels. Here are some highlights, all courtesy of the Huffington Post.

It's okay to be different

Many of Roald Dahl's protagonists are very different from the people around them. But characters like Matilda, Willy Wonka and James from James and the Giant Peach show us that our differences are what make us human – and quite extraordinary! Be true to yourself. Do what you love, love what you do, and you will find true happiness and success!

Reading is fundamentally important, and it can change your life

Matilda loves books because they transported her to all sorts of exciting new places and introduced her to all sorts of weird and wonderful people. Books are incredibly powerful, and they will change your life. To quote Dr. Seuss, "Oh, the place you'll go!"

It's important to be independent

While our families are probably all a lot nicer than Matilda's, it is important to know that there will be times when people will not be there to support us. Sometimes, people will let you down. While this can be heartbreaking, it teaches us that we need have the ability to be okay with doing things (and having fun!) alone.

Appearances can be deceiving

The BFG is a big and friendly giant, while the witches are "demons in human form." These novels warn us against judging a book by its cover, teaching us to look at other's characters rather than their appearances.

You can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it 

Look at the marvellous things that Roald Dahl's characters achieve in his novels! Roald Dahl would have wanted us to know that with determination, anything is possible. Just like my favourite actress Audrey Hepburn said, "Nothing is impossible, the word itself says I'm possible!"

Sometimes, dreams do come true

Charlie never thought in a million years he would have a chance to win a golden ticket and Matilda never thought she would get away from her horrid family. Luckily – spoiler alert – their dreams come true! Don't stop believing!

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What's your favourite Roald Dahl book? 

The Treasure of Kassy C.

On Tuesday, Selina and I read Walter Dean Myers' short story called The Treasure of Lemon Brown. Selina then wrote a wonderful blog post about what she learnt from the story, going onto discuss her own treasures – her books – and how special they are to her.

Just like Lemon Brown says, "Every man got a treasure." But not every man is a pirate with an old wooden treasure chest overbrimming with all the stolen riches in the world. Our treasures are not things that have monetary value but sentimental value. Indeed, even William Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language, believed so; one of the most famous quotes from his play The Merchant of Venice is "All that glitters is not gold."

Like Selina, my treasure also has to do with books. However, it is a very specific book – my well-worn copy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which is my all-time favourite novel. My mum bought my copy for me from Whitcoulls, a bookstore in New Zealand. This book has travelled with me everywhere – from New Zealand to Taiwan to Los Angeles.

Others may think that my copy of Pride and Prejudice is outdated and insignificant, and indeed, there are many much nicer hardcover versions out there. But little do they know that the creases on the spine correspond directly with my favourite pages in the book, meaning if you were to pick up my book, it will almost always open to the part I love best. To me, these bends and cracks are not the signs of deterioration; they are the marks of love.

I once thought I lost the book when we moved from one city to another. I scoured the house and ransacked through dozens of boxes in search of the book, but all to no avail. I was so upset that my parents conceded and bought me a new and much nicer copy. It just didn't feel the same though. This wasn't the copy that I had held in my hands the first time I read it and fell in love with Mr. Darcy, and it certainly wasn't the copy I proudly carried everywhere as I declared I wanted to be just like its heroine, Lizzie Bennett.

Luckily, I did end up finding my old copy, and now I have two copies of Pride and Prejudice. Even though the stories are exactly the same, you can guess which copy I love more.

What is your treasure and why is it valuable to you?