You have heard it said that Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, or maybe T.S. Eliot once said, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” No, apparently Pascal wrote it somewhere and even he may have gotten it from somewhere else. This is one more bit of evidence to support my reluctance to trust unsourced quote databases.
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See also the Quote Investigator’s take:
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
I know for a fact that Chesterton said something to this point, early in his career as a journalist. It’d take hours to look up the quote in my library, but I remember it pretty vividly.
Essentially, someone complained that his paragraphs were too long. He said that there is a legitimate complaint about his *essays* being too long, but that it would take too long to make them shorter.
Needless to say his final response was that he won’t shorten the paragraphs (“I can understand my readers wanting less of me, but I’m not sure they’d like me any better if cut up into smaller pieces”) but that he’d at least try to switch from topic to topic with greater frequency.
So we can add him to the list of the Quote Investigator’s works.
Yes. My context for this post was my investigation into whether Abraham Lincoln wrote it in a letter, but I found no support for that. An admired advertising executive makes that claim in a book, but I didn’t find anyone but him attributing the quote to Lincoln.
How funny! I am reading that book by the admired advertising exec (Damn Good Advice, right?), and I saw the quote attributed to Lincoln. I always thought it was Mark Twain, so I did an internet search and I landed here. It’s a great quote.