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Who really said it

Most Conversations Are Simply Monologues Delivered in the Presence of a Witness

Not Mark Twain — actually Margaret Millar Margaret Millar 1915–1994 · Canadian-American mystery novelist
Disputed In copyright

The line is a piece of dialogue from The Weak-Eyed Bat, the 1942 mystery novel by Margaret Millar — Quote Investigator traced it to page 117 and verified it against library scans ↗. Millar wrote “a witness,” singular; there is no substantive evidence that Mark Twain ever wrote or spoke it.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Most Conversations Are Simply Monologues Delivered in the Presence of a Witness” Margaret Millar, The Weak-Eyed Bat (Doubleday, Doran & Co. for the Crime Club, 1942), p. 117. Frequently misattributed to Mark Twain. Via Quotle.info

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

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Margaret Millar; permissions handled through the Margaret Millar Charitable Remainder Unitrust. North American publishing rights to her books were acquired by Syndicate Books in 2014.). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Margaret Millar — Canadian-American mystery novelist. Theme: "Most Conversations Are Simply Monologues Delivered in the Presence of a Witness". 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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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Most Conversations Are Simply Monologues Delivered in the Presence of a Witness". 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 source

Source
The Weak-Eyed Bat
First published
1942 — published for the Crime Club by Doubleday, Doran & Co., Garden City, New York
Quote page
Page 117, verified against library scans by Quote Investigator
Original wording
“a witness,” singular — the plural “witnesses” is a later variant

“As a matter of fact, have you never noticed that most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness?”
“No,” Jakes said. The Weak-Eyed Bat, p. 117

The line is dialogue, not authorial narration — it is put to a character named Jakes, who is unimpressed. Quote Investigator obtained scans of the 1942 edition through the library system of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Quote Investigator: the 1942 Margaret Millar citation

How the attribution moved

In copyright

The Weak-Eyed Bat was first published in 1942, well after the 1931 United States public-domain cutoff, so this text is treated as in copyright. The rights are actively managed: Syndicate Books announced in 2014 that it had acquired North American publishing rights to all 27 Millar books from her estate ↗, and the archive holding her papers directs permission requests to the Margaret Millar Charitable Remainder Unitrust ↗. Quote the sentence with attribution; do not reproduce the surrounding text.

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 gets pinned on, and why

This is a textbook famous-name upgrade: a working mystery novelist writes a good line, an anthology reprints it, the wording softens, and eventually the biggest name in American humour absorbs it.

Mark Twain No evidence

Quote Investigator states plainly that there is no substantive evidence Twain wrote or spoke the statement, and documents the Twain ascription only from 2013, in the business book Real Influence by Mark Goulston and John B. Ullmen — where it appears as “Most conversations are monologues in the presence of witnesses.” Twain’s own documented remark on the subject, in a letter of 20 August 1886 to Clara Spalding, runs quite differently: all conversations, he wrote, are but debates. See the chronology ↗

Robert Byrne’s 1990 quotation collection Wording drift

Byrne’s fourth Best Things Anybody Ever Said compilation credited Millar correctly but printed the plural “witnesses,” departing from the 1942 text. The plural is the form that later circulated under Twain’s name. Quote Investigator flags the change ↗

Leo Buscaglia Different saying

A 1987 management book quoted the popular speaker Leo Buscaglia on conversations being “alternating monologues” — a related thought, but not this sentence, and not a route to Millar’s wording. Cited in the same investigation ↗

Margaret Millar wrote it, in The Weak-Eyed Bat in 1942, on page 117, with “a witness” in the singular — verified against library scans by Quote Investigator ↗.

Context

Why the line drifted to Twain

Millar’s sentence is a joke told in a book, by a character trying to be clever — and it works because it is faintly insulting to everyone in earshot. That is exactly the register people associate with Mark Twain, which is most of the explanation for how a 1942 Canadian mystery novel lost its byline.

The mechanism is visible in the paper trail. Quote Investigator shows the saying travelling correctly credited through a quotation anthology, picking up a small wording change along the way, and then, seven decades after the novel, in print under Twain’s name in a 2013 management title — and once a line is there, it is effectively laundered.

Millar wrote “a witness.” The version pinned on Twain says “witnesses.”

The older ideas behind the line

The observation was not new in 1942, and Quote Investigator lays out the lineage: an 1863 Richmond newspaper serial joked about a conversation that was “more properly speaking, the two monologues”; a 1901 essay said Hamlet’s conversations were monologues; and a 1918 book recorded an English traveller complaining that Americans do not converse but indulge instead in “a series of monologues.”

Closest of all, Rebecca West opened a story in her 1935 collection The Harsh Voice with the observation that conversation is an illusion — there are only intersecting monologues. Millar’s contribution is the sharp final image, the witness, rather than the underlying idea.

Explore

Filed under

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

Friendship Truth Humility

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 anchor investigation — the 1942 Millar citation, the 1935 Rebecca West precursor, and the 2013 Twain reassignment, with bibliographic notes.
Wikiquote: Monologueen.wikiquote.org

Lists the saying under Margaret Millar’s name, alongside the Rebecca West and Truman Capote lines on the same theme.
Library of America: Margaret Millarwomencrime.loa.org

Biography from the Women Crime Writers project, including the Paul Prye novels and the 1983 MWA Grand Master award.
Collected Millar: The First Detectivesarchive.org

The Syndicate Books collected edition that reprints The Weak-Eyed Bat; lending-restricted scan at the Internet Archive.
Syndicate Books acquires the Millar estatesyndicatebooks.com

2014 announcement of North American publishing rights to all 27 Millar books — the current commercial rights chain.
The Apocryphal Twainmarktwainstudies.com

The Center for Mark Twain Studies’ running series on sayings habitually misattributed to Twain.

The real author

Who was Margaret Millar?

Margaret Millar

1915–1994 · Canadian-American mystery novelist

Margaret Millar was born in Kitchener, Ontario in 1915 and died in Santa Barbara, California in 1994. She married Kenneth Millar — later famous as Ross Macdonald — in 1938, and out-published him for a stretch: her early novels featured the poetry-quoting psychiatric detective Paul Prye, of whom The Weak-Eyed Bat (1942) was the second outing. She won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1956 for Beast in View and was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1983.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this source

Millar, Margaret. The Weak-Eyed Bat. Garden City, NY: Published for the Crime Club by Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1942, 117. Attribution history traced in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Most Conversations Are Simply Monologues Delivered in the Presence of a Witness,” February 4, 2014.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Most Conversations Are Simply Monologues Delivered in the Presence of a Witness’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/most-conversations-are-simply-monologues-delivered-in-the/

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