The only statement that comes to mind is Twain's observation about letting the barrel refill after a bout of work, but I can't recall the exact source of that one. My favorite comment is his passage on narrative in Life on the Mississippi and in his Autobiography: "Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and leafy woodlands, its course changed by every grass-clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; its surface broken, but its course not stayed by rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around,a dn at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traversed an hour before; but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law." For comparison, look at James Garfield's comment of June 21, 1879 on the Mississippi River, which parallels Twain's description of narrative very well: "It was said . . by a great and eminenbt politician of Mississippi ... that there were some things which were subject to the laws of science; that there were some things which could be controlled by man's ingenuity and man's devices; but that the Mississippi was not one of those things. He said that God Almighty, when he made [it] and bade its great floods flow from the mountains to the sea, said 'Let her rip; there is no law to govern it." (See Horwitz, By the Law of Nature, p 97). -- Barbara Ladd Emory University