Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

It Took Me Fifteen Years to Discover That I Had No Talent for Writing. Did You Quit?

Not Groucho Marx — an anonymous 1912 magazine joke Anonymous (Puck magazine, 1912) Unsigned dialogue printed 28 February 1912 · probably later used by Robert Benchley, 1889–1945
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Groucho Marx has no documented claim on this line at all. The joke was already in print as an unsigned dialogue in the humour magazine Puck on 28 February 1912 — about failing at poetry, over “nearly ten years,” not fifteen. It was pinned on Mark Twain in 1946 and on Robert Benchley in 1949, and the snappy second line — “Did you quit?” — appears in no period source at all: it is the headline Quote Investigator ↗ wrote over its own 2012 investigation.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“It Took Me Fifteen Years to Discover That I Had No Talent for Writing. Did You Quit?” Not Groucho Marx. The joke first appeared as an unsigned dialogue in Puck, vol. 71 (28 February 1912), p. 5, under the title "Couldn't Afford To Then" — and it was about poetry, over "nearly ten years," not fifteen. Walter Winchell credited it to Mark Twain in January 1946; Reader's Digest credited it to Robert Benchley in September 1949, four years after Benchley's death. The second line, "Did you quit?", is the headline of Quote Investigator's 2012 article, not wording from any period source. — Quotle.info · Verbatim: “SCRIBBLER.—It took me nearly ten years to learn that I couldn't write poetry. FRIEND.—Gave it up then, did you? SCRIBBLER.—Oh, no. By that time I had a reputation.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Groucho Marx. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the themes of failure, resilience and work. Theme: "It Took Me Fifteen Years to Discover That I Had No Talent for Writing. Did You Quit?". 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.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "It Took Me Fifteen Years to Discover That I Had No Talent for Writing. Did You Quit?". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The 1912 original — about poetry, and ten years

Earliest known printing
Puck, vol. 71 (28 February 1912), p. 5, col. 3 — "Couldn't Afford To Then"
Author
Unsigned. Speakers are generic: SCRIBBLER and FRIEND
First Twain credit
Walter Winchell's column, 26 January 1946 — still "ten years"
First Benchley credit
Reader's Digest 55 (September 1949), p. 118 — first appearance of "15 years"

SCRIBBLER.—It took me nearly ten years to learn that I couldn’t write poetry.
FRIEND.—Gave it up then, did you?
SCRIBBLER.—Oh, no. By that time I had a reputation. Puck, 28 February 1912

Note what is not here: no fifteen years, no “no talent for writing,” no “too famous,” and no Groucho, Twain or Benchley. The subject is poetry. Those elements accumulated over the following decades, and the wording quoted today — transcribed in Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ — is first recorded in 1949.

Quote Investigator: the full 1912–2001 chronology

How this was checked

  • The earliest printing is the unsigned dialogue “Couldn’t Afford To Then” in Puck, 28 February 1912, reprinted with credit to Puck in three newspapers the following month — located and transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗, which cites the volume to HathiTrust.
  • That volume is checkable: Penn Libraries’ Online Books Page listing for Puck ↗ states that volumes “1-3, 5-7, 9-34, 37-38, 49-50, 52, 55, 58, 62, 65, 71-72, 75-77, and 80-81” of the English edition are freely viewable — volume 71 among them.
  • The Benchley credit rests on one late, second-hand source. Wikiquote ↗ cites only Nathaniel Benchley’s Robert Benchley (1955), ch. 1 — a book McGraw-Hill published in 1955 ↗, ten years after Robert Benchley’s death.
  • The Groucho credit has no foothold anywhere: the line appears nowhere on his Wikiquote page ↗, which does maintain a Misattributed section — so its absence there is meaningful rather than an accident of how that page is organised.

No rights status can honestly be asserted for the wording on this page. The 1912 Puck ancestor is long out of copyright, but that is not the sentence people quote. The familiar “fifteen years… too famous” wording is first documented in Reader’s Digest in September 1949 and in Nathaniel Benchley’s 1955 McGraw-Hill biography ↗ — both well after 1931 — with no identifiable author behind the phrasing itself, and the paired second line is a 2012 editorial headline. Treat it as of uncertain status rather than assuming it is free to reuse.

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

Three names, none of them the author

This is an unusually well-documented case of a joke acquiring famous owners it never had. Quote Investigator’s chronology shows the gag in print, unsigned, decades before any of the three men now credited with it were named — and shows that the two-line form circulating today was assembled by a modern researcher, not by anyone in the period.

Groucho Marx No supporting evidence

Groucho appears exactly once in the documented record of this joke, and not as its speaker: in Charlotte Chandler’s 1978 interview book he recalls Benchley saying a related but different line — “I realized I wasn’t funny, but I’d been doing it for fifteen years, and I was so successful I couldn’t stop” (Quote Investigator ↗). The line is absent from his Wikiquote page ↗ entirely, including the Misattributed section that page maintains.

Mark Twain First claimed 1946

Walter Winchell’s syndicated column of 26 January 1946, under the heading “Little Known Stories About Well-Known People,” is the earliest known Twain attribution — thirty-six years after Twain’s death, and Winchell’s version still says ten years. The 1972 collection Everyone’s Mark Twain repeats it, but its own supporting citation is a 1952 newsletter (Quote Investigator ↗).

Robert Benchley First claimed 1949 — posthumously

Reader’s Digest’s “Quotable Quotes” column of September 1949 is the first known Benchley credit and the first appearance of “15 years.” Benchley died in November 1945. His son Nathaniel repeated it as something his father “once said” in his 1955 biography, which is the sole citation Wikiquote ↗ offers. Quote Investigator’s verdict is careful and worth preserving: Benchley probably used the joke, but did not create it.

“Did you quit?” — nobody said this A 2012 headline

No period source contains these words. They are the title Quote Investigator gave its own article. The actual recorded responses are “Gave it up then, did you?” (1912), “I suppose you gave it up, then?” (1912 and 1920), “You gave up?” (1936) and “And you gave it up?” (Winchell, 1946) — all transcribed in the investigation itself ↗. Any page presenting “Did you quit?” as a historical quotation is quoting the researcher, not the record.

The honest answer: an anonymous gagwriter for Puck, in February 1912, wrote a joke about giving up on poetry — and it has been finding famous mouths to live in ever since (Quote Investigator ↗).

Context

A joke with a thirty-seven-year head start on its author

Most misattributions are a famous name stealing a line from an obscure one. This is stranger: the line never had an author to steal from. It surfaces in Puck in February 1912 as filler — a two-line exchange between characters called SCRIBBLER and FRIEND, unsigned, sold by the column-inch. Within weeks it had been clipped and reprinted, with credit to Puck, in the Springfield Republican, the Seattle Daily Times and the Jersey Journal. That is how jokes moved in 1912, and nobody involved imagined anyone would ever ask who wrote one.

Then it drifted. By September 1912 the failure was at stories rather than poetry; by 1936 the punchline had hardened into “by that time I was too famous”; by 1943 Evan Esar had filed it as a dictionary definition of writer. Only once the wording was fully formed did it start attracting names — Twain in 1946, Benchley in 1949, and eventually, on the internet, Groucho Marx. A joke that circulated for decades with no author at all ended up with three.

The gag was in newspapers when Benchley was twenty-two. His name was attached to it four years after he died.

The full drift, 1912 to 1978

1912, Puck: “It took me nearly ten years to learn that I couldn’t write poetry.” / “Gave it up then, did you?” / “Oh, no. By that time I had a reputation.”

1912, The Independent: the same shape, but the failure is now at stories, credited to the New York American. 1920, Life: reprinted as “A Popular Author,” credited to the Kansas Brown Bull.

1936, The Literary Digest: “it took me ten years to discover that I had absolutely no talent for writing literature” — and the modern punchline arrives: “Oh, no; by that time I was too famous.”

1946, Walter Winchell: the first Mark Twain credit, still at ten years. May 1949, The Saturday Review: a Jack Markow cartoon compresses it into one speaker’s line. September 1949, Reader’s Digest: the first Benchley credit, and the first “15 years.”

1978, Charlotte Chandler: Groucho Marx, interviewed near the end of his life, quotes Benchley saying something related but distinctly different — “I realized I wasn’t funny, but I’d been doing it for fifteen years, and I was so successful I couldn’t stop.” That is the entirety of Groucho’s documented involvement: he was quoting someone else.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Failure Resilience Work

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full chronologyquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation. Traces the joke from the unsigned 1912 Puck dialogue through Winchell's 1946 Twain credit and the 1949 Reader's Digest Benchley credit, with eighteen dated bibliographic notes.
Wikiquote: Robert Benchleyen.wikiquote.org

Carries the modern fifteen-years wording under its Quotes heading, sourced only to Nathaniel Benchley's 1955 biography of his father, ch. 1 — the late, second-hand citation that the QI chronology puts in context.
Wikiquote: Groucho Marxen.wikiquote.org

Negative evidence. The line appears nowhere on the page — not in Quotes, and not in the Misattributed section the page does maintain for exactly this kind of false credit.
The Online Books Page: Puckonlinebooks.library.upenn.edu

Penn Libraries' serial index for Puck, confirming that volume 71 — the 1912 volume containing the earliest known printing — is among the freely viewable digitised volumes at HathiTrust.
Wikipedia: Robert Benchleyen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the humorist the joke was eventually pinned on: 1889–1945, Algonquin Round Table founding member, Vanity Fair, Life and New Yorker critic.
Wikipedia: Puck (magazine)en.wikipedia.org

Background on the American humour magazine where the joke first appeared — founded 1876 by Joseph Keppler and Adolph Schwarzmann, published until 1918.

The humorist whose name it landed on

Robert Benchley — the man who probably used it, and certainly didn't write it

Robert Benchley

1889–1945 · American humorist, drama critic and actor

Robert Charles Benchley (1889–1945) was an American humorist, drama critic and actor, a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table who wrote for Vanity Fair, Life and The New Yorker before a second career in short comic films. His speciality was the flustered ordinary man defeated by ordinary things, delivered in a tone of unbothered self-deprecation — which is exactly why this joke fits him so comfortably, and exactly why it stuck to him. He did not invent it. Quote Investigator finds the gag in print in 1912, when Benchley was twenty-two and years from publishing humour, and his name was first attached to it in Reader’s Digest in September 1949, four years after his death.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest known printing

“Couldn’t Afford To Then.” Puck 71 (February 28, 1912): 5, col. 3. Unsigned. Earliest printing located by Quote Investigator, “Dialogue Origin: ‘It Took Me Fifteen Years to Discover That I Had No Talent for Writing.’ ‘Did You Quit?’” October 9, 2012, which also traces the Twain credit to Walter Winchell’s column of January 26, 1946 and the Benchley credit to Reader’s Digest 55 (September 1949): 118.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It Took Me Fifteen Years to Discover That I Had No Talent for Writing. Did You Quit?’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-took-me-fifteen-years-to-discover-that-i-had-no-talent/

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