Yes, I set up safeguards, the first day's dictating taking this position: that an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author's cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell ... the result being that the reader knows the author despite his wily diligence.
Samuel Clemens in a letter to William Dean Howells, 14 March, 1949
Quote in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1
thank god it's not willie diligence
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