Thanks, Barbara! As I googled, I was enjoying some of your AI-generated
images that accompany Twain's cat quotes.

On Thu, Aug 22, 2024 at 1:18 PM Barbara Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> "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-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested
> spectator neither it nor its smell (though I didn't use that figure)--the
> result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily
> diligences."
> - Letter to William D. Howells, 14 March 1904
>
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2024 at 3:09 PM B. Clay Shannon <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > What is the Mark Twain quote about how an author cannot conceal himself;
> he
> > reveals himself between the lines; he refers to the writer as "the
> > author-cat," I think, and talks about him scratching "cat litter" over
> the
> > clues to his true nature that he leaves behind (or some such).
> >
> > I've been googling my head off but can't find it...
> >
> > --
> > Clay Shannon
> > (831) 251-4279
> >
>


-- 
Clay Shannon
(831) 251-4279