Fitzgerald said it to the columnist Sheilah Graham while rewriting a radio script for her, and she printed it in her 1958 memoir Beloved Infidel — the earliest documented appearance Quote Investigator found ↗. Mark Twain did grumble about “whooping exclamation-points” in an essay collected in 1898, but he never wrote this sentence, and QI calls the resemblance only a partial match.
“An Exclamation Point Is Like Laughing at Your Own Joke” F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted in Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank, Beloved Infidel: The Education of a Woman (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958), 197–198. Not Mark Twain. Via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Mark Twain. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald — American novelist & Hollywood screenwriter. Theme: "An Exclamation Point Is Like Laughing at Your Own Joke". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
Where it actually comes from
Source
Beloved Infidel: The Education of a Woman
Authors
Sheilah Graham with Gerold Frank
Published
Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1958 · chapter 18, pages 197–198
Spoken by
F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Graham, in Hollywood
“Cut out all these exclamation points,” he said. “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
Beloved Infidel, ch. 18
Graham had written a five-minute script for her first radio broadcast and showed it to Fitzgerald. Tired from a day’s work at the studio, he sat down with a pencil and rewrote her copy line by line, correcting her grammar and marking the words to stress — and this was the advice he gave as he worked.
1898 — Twain publishes the collection How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays (Harper & Brothers), whose title essay first appeared in The Youth’s Companion. In it he mocks the comic storyteller who italicises his own punchline and “puts some whooping exclamation-points after it” ↗ — the same target, but not this sentence.
1958 — Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald’s companion through his last Hollywood years, prints the remark in Beloved Infidel ↗, written with Gerold Frank and published by Henry Holt.
1999 — Jon Winokur’s Advice to Writers anthologises it under Fitzgerald’s name in the punctuation section, with “points” changed to “marks,” per Quote Investigator ↗.
Today — a reworded version circulates under Mark Twain’s name on the big quote sites with no source given ↗.
The only documented source for this wording is Beloved Infidel, published in 1958 — well after the 1931 US public-domain cutoff — so the passage quoted here is still in copyright and is reproduced as a short citation. Twain’s own 1898 essay is public domain, but it does not contain this line.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Who it isn't
Two things went wrong on the way to the internet: the wrong author, and then the wrong noun.
✕
The whole lineMark Twain No source
Quote sites run a smoothed-out version — “One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke” — under Twain’s name with no citation attached ↗. No Twain work contains it, and the sentence structure (“One should never…”) is the tell-tale flattening of an anonymous rewrite.
✕
The near-miss that fuels itMark Twain, genuinely Different words
Twain really did attack the exclamation point, in the essay “How to Tell a Story” — the comic storyteller who “puts some whooping exclamation-points after it” ↗. Quote Investigator judges the resemblance only partial: the “laughing at your own joke” comparison is not there.
~
The wordingJon Winokur's 1999 anthology Drift
Advice to Writers reprinted the line correctly under Fitzgerald’s name but swapped “points” for “marks,” as Quote Investigator documents ↗ — which is why the “exclamation mark” form is now the one most often quoted.
✓The earliest documented appearance is Sheilah Graham’s 1958 memoir Beloved Infidel, where Fitzgerald says it to her over a radio script: Quote Investigator verified the passage on paper ↗ at pages 197–198.
Context
Why the mix-up sticks
Twain is the default owner of any crisp, funny line about writing, and in this case the misfiling has a real hook to hang on: he genuinely did despise the exclamation point. In “How to Tell a Story” ↗ he sneers at the comic storyteller who cannot leave his own punchline alone — who italicises it, “puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis.” Same target, same contempt, different sentence.
Fitzgerald’s version is the one that survived because it is a better joke. It turns a punctuation rule into an image of social embarrassment: the writer chuckling at his own gag while the room stays quiet. And it comes from a scene worth picturing — a broke, dying novelist sitting down with a stubby pencil to line-edit his girlfriend’s five-minute radio script.
Twain hated the exclamation point too. He just never put it this way.
How solid is the Fitzgerald credit?
It rests on a single first-hand account. Sheilah Graham was in the room, but she published the memory in 1958, almost two decades after Fitzgerald died in 1940 — a gap Quote Investigator flags explicitly ↗ before concluding it is nonetheless reasonable to credit him.
The wording most people quote today has already drifted once. Jon Winokur’s 1999 anthology Advice to Writers reprinted the line under Fitzgerald’s name with “points” changed to “marks,” and that is the form that circulates on writing-advice lists.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1896–1940 · American novelist & Hollywood screenwriter
Fitzgerald was the chronicler of the Jazz Age, author of This Side of Paradise (1920), The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934). Broke and out of fashion by the late 1930s, he moved to Hollywood to write for the studios and lived his last years with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who found him after his fatal heart attack in December 1940. He was an obsessive line-editor of his own prose and of hers — which is exactly the setting in which this piece of advice was handed over.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
How to cite this
Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank, Beloved Infidel: The Education of a Woman (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958), chap. 18, 197–198. Earliest documented appearance per Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: An Exclamation Point Is Like Laughing at Your Own Joke” (5 February 2015).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘An Exclamation Point Is Like Laughing at Your Own Joke’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/an-exclamation-point-is-like-laughing-at-your-own-joke/