Carlo DeVito > Quotes

“You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain & mud of Angel’s Camp—I mean that day we sat around the tavern stove & heard that chap tell about the frog & how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn & laughed over it, out there on the hillside while you & dear old Stoker panned & washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, & would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up. I published that story, & it became widely known in America, India, China, England,—& the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands & thousands of dollars since.”
― Carlo DeVito, Mark Twain's Notebooks: Journals, Letters, Observations, Wit, Wisdom, and Doodles

“he decided to try his hand as a publisher. His first book was his greatest success: Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs. Grant had been facing financial ruin after his presidency, and Twain offered him an outrageous sum to publish the work, sure that it would be a hit. Grant wrote the book with a death sentence hanging over his head, suffering from terminal cancer. Twain wrote of Grant, “I then believed he would live several months. He was still adding little perfecting details to his book, and preface, among other things. He was entirely through a few days later. Since then the lack of any strong interest to employ his mind has enabled the tedious weariness to kill him. I think his book kept him alive several months. He was a very great man and superlatively good.” Grant died days after finishing his memoir, which was a huge success, restoring his family’s fortunes and making Twain even richer.”
― Carlo DeVito, Mark Twain's Notebooks: Journals, Letters, Observations, Wit, Wisdom, and Doodles