California IN BRIEF : BERKELEY : Twain Scholars Read His Quips

Scholars can’t be certain Mark Twain said, “Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” But they’re agreed the phrase bears the hallmarks of the author, wit and raconteur. Scholars of the Mark Twain Papers at UC Berkeley have spent years tracking down the sources of quips credited to Twain. But so far, they have only come up with a list of what Twain might not have said. They include: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”; “When I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it passes away”; “Giving up smoking is easy. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” Editor Kenneth Sanderson declared, “We can’t say for certain that he did not say or write these,” but “we cannot find the citations for these. And we’ve looked.” Twain sometimes did live up to the wittiness attributed to him. When a rumor circulated about his demise, he cabled from London in 1897: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”