This is a floating joke that circulated anonymously in print for decades, not a Twain line. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that Twain “did write about quitting smoking, but there is no substantive evidence that he made this particular joke” — the earliest instance it located is about poker, in an 1905 novel, and the joke only acquired Twain’s name in 1938, twenty-eight years after he died. It has never been found in Twain’s books, speeches or letters.
“It's Easy to Quit Smoking. I've Done It a Thousand Times” Not Mark Twain. Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence Twain ever said it. The earliest instance it located is a poker gag in Harris Dickson's 1905 novel "Duke of Devil-May-Care," and the first credit to Twain appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association in December 1938, twenty-eight years after his death. W. C. Fields performed a drinking version but did not coin it. Source: quoteinvestigator.com
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Mark Twain. 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, character and change. Theme: "It's Easy to Quit Smoking. I've Done It a Thousand Times". 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's Easy to Quit Smoking. I've Done It a Thousand Times". 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
Where the joke actually comes from
Earliest located instance
Duke of Devil-May-Care
Published
Harris Dickson — D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1905. The gag is about poker, not tobacco.
First credit to Twain
Journal of the American Medical Association, 10 December 1938 — twenty-eight years after his death
In Twain’s own work
No instance found in any book, speech or letter
“Noel,” he said, “I thought you’d quit playing poker?”
Duke smiled back blandly. “I have; I’ve quit more’n a thousand times, every time the game breaks up. Shucks, boy, it’s dead easy to quit playing poker. But I must have a little sport when I go to town—that don’t count.”
Not about smoking. Not by Twain.
This is the earliest instance of the joke that Quote Investigator ↗ was able to locate, transcribed there from Harris Dickson’s 1905 novel Duke of Devil-May-Care. QI is careful to add that “earlier examples may certainly exist” — this is the front of the paper trail, not a proven origin. The subject is poker; the smoking and drinking versions came later.
1905 — poker. The earliest instance Quote Investigator located ↗ is in Harris Dickson’s novel Duke of Devil-May-Care: “I’ve quit more’n a thousand times … it’s dead easy to quit playing poker.” Nobody’s name is on the joke.
1929–1936 — it migrates to drink and tobacco. An Omaha paper ran a Prohibition-era drinking version in 1929; the March 1932 Norfolk and Western Magazine printed a railway operator’s smoking version — “It is easy to quit; I have quit at least a hundred times” — and a 1936 Texas trade magazine had “I have quit a thousand times.” All anonymous, per QI ↗.
1938 — two things happen at once.W. C. Fields ↗ was performing a drinking version in his routine “The Temperance Lecture,” broadcast to radio listeners by 1938 ↗, and in December the Journal of the American Medical Association printed the first known sentence tying the gag to Twain — “Mark Twain is reputed to have remarked …” — that hedging word ‘reputed’ and all ↗.
1945 — the credit sets.Reader’s Digest printed it as a freestanding Twain quotation, sourced only to Coronet magazine. From a mass-circulation monthly it never came loose again — and it still appears in no section of Wikiquote’s Mark Twain page ↗.
No copyright status can honestly be asserted for this wording, because no authored source for it has ever been identified. It is an anonymous joke that circulated in variable form for decades. The separate texts quoted on this page have their own status: Harris Dickson’s Duke of Devil-May-Care (1905) and Twain’s own genuine remarks are long in the public domain in the United States, while W. C. Fields’s “The Temperance Lecture” routine is a distinct twentieth-century work with its own rights. None of those is the source of the sentence people quote.
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 gets the credit, and why none of them earned it
This is one of the most-shared “Mark Twain” lines on the internet, and it is also one of the cleanest examples of how a nameless joke acquires a famous owner. Three different people are commonly named as its author. None of them can be shown to have written it.
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The popular creditMark Twain No evidence
Quote Investigator ↗ states that Twain “did write about quitting smoking, but there is no substantive evidence that he made this particular joke.” The earliest link to his name that QI found is a December 1938 medical-journal aside that itself only says Twain “is reputed to have remarked” it — twenty-eight years after his death in 1910, and more than thirty years after the joke was already in print without him. The line appears nowhere on Wikiquote’s Mark Twain page ↗, in any section.
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The usual correctionW. C. Fields Performed it, didn’t coin it
The standard debunking says the joke is really Fields’s, and about drinking. He did deliver it — “Now don’t say you can’t swear off drinking; it’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times” — in his routine “The Temperance Lecture.” But QI is explicit ↗ that “he did not coin it,” and the drinking version was in newspapers years before he performed it. Wikipedia ↗ credits the routine itself to comedy writer Bill Morrow, not to Fields.
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The quote itselfNo stable wording exists Floating gag
There is no canonical text to authenticate. It circulates as “a thousand times” and “hundreds of times”; as “it’s easy to quit” and “the easiest thing in the world”; and about smoking, drinking and poker by turns. QI’s chronology ↗ shows the subject swapping freely between 1905 and 1945. A joke that reshapes itself this readily is folklore, not authorship.
✓The honest answer is that nobody knows who first made this joke. The earliest version anyone has found ↗ is a poker gag in a forgotten 1905 novel — and even that, its own researcher cautions, may not be the first.
Context
Why it stuck to Twain
Misattribution is rarely random. This joke found Mark Twain because it fit him almost perfectly: he really was a famous, unrepentant, near-continuous cigar smoker, and he really did make jokes about his own failure to stop. At his seventieth birthday dinner at Delmonico’s on 5 December 1905, he told the room: “I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking.” That is a documented Twain line ↗, and it is the same joke in shape — mock-discipline concealing total surrender.
He also wrote the real version of the quitting joke, in a letter to his friend Elizabeth Wallace, printed in her 1913 memoir Mark Twain and the Happy Island: “I was warned to stop smoking, which I did, for two or three days, but it was too lonesome, and I have resumed — in a modified way — 4 smokes a day instead of 40. This will have a good effect. On the bank balance.” It is funnier than the line the internet gives him. It is also, unlike that line, actually his.
4 smokes a day instead of 40. This will have a good effect. On the bank balance.
Read the full story
The Wallace letter is undated in her book, and Twain signs it “S. L. C.” — Samuel Langhorne Clemens. It appears on page 130 of Mark Twain and the Happy Island (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1913), which can be read in full at the Internet Archive ↗. Wallace, a dean at the University of Chicago, befriended Twain during his visits to Bermuda in his last years.
The pattern here is well documented by Twain scholars. The Center for Mark Twain Studies ↗ runs a standing series on apocryphal quotations, opening from the premise that “there is perhaps no greater testament to Twain’s lasting reputation than the habitual misattribution of miscellaneous wit and wisdom to his name.” A joke about failing to quit a vice, told with rueful self-knowledge, is exactly the kind of orphan wit that drifts toward him.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1835–1910 · American writer, humorist and lifelong cigar smoker
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (30 November 1835 – 21 April 1910), writing as Mark Twain, was an American novelist, humorist and lecturer whose comic voice is so recognisable that unattributed wit still drifts toward his name more than a century after his death. He was also a genuinely prodigious smoker who joked about it constantly — telling his seventieth-birthday dinner that he never smoked more than one cigar at a time, and writing to a friend that after being warned off tobacco he had lasted “two or three days” before settling for four cigars a day instead of forty. That is why this particular orphan joke found him: it sounds like something he would have said, which is not the same thing as something he did say.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented instance
Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: It’s Easy to Quit Smoking. I’ve Done It a Thousand Times,” 19 September 2012. Earliest instance located there: Harris Dickson, Duke of Devil-May-Care (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905), 14–15 — a poker joke, not a smoking one, and unattributed. Earliest credit to Twain located there: Bayard T. Horton, “The Outlook in Thrombo-Angiitis Obliterans,” Journal of the American Medical Association 111, no. 24 (10 December 1938): 2188. No instance of the quip has been located in Mark Twain’s published works, speeches or letters.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It's Easy to Quit Smoking. I've Done It a Thousand Times’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/its-easy-to-quit-smoking-ive-done-it-a-thousand-times/