Larry McMurtry in NYRB (in 2004): ‘His cranky, abstemious admirer George Bernard Shaw went so far as to say that it was Mark Twain who taught him that “telling the truth was the funniest joke in the world.”’ And: ‘Throughout his life financial folly, not sexual folly, imperiled Mark Twain.’

As well: ‘On the day that he was informed that his daughter Jean was dead—Christmas Eve morning, 1909—he told a sympathizer that now he knew what a soldier felt when he received a bullet in the heart. But the heart-shot soldier presumably didn’t have to get up and go on living the next day, and Mark Twain did.’

The living have to get up, fairly often.

McMurtry adds that Shaw and Twain were willing to discard the truth like a bicycle that didn’t go fast enough.

Financial folly, sexual folly. What’s a writer’s life without it?

(a sf 2115)