"This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four." This is Mark Twain's take on All Fool's (or April Fool's) Day which is celebrated, if that is the appropriate word, on the first of April every year.

Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, died at the age of 74 on April 21, 1910. He had predicted the year of his death. In 1909, he said, "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks. They came in together, they must go out together'." He died the day after the comet's closest approach to earth.

Sense of humour

My first encounter with Mark Twain was through Tom Sawyer and it was enough to make me seek out and value his works which are marked, in fact decorated, by a strong sense of humour that could be as blunt as a Mississippi madam or as sharp as a dueling sword. Beneath the surface always lurked a strong social conscience and a defiant delinquent who hated pretence.

A hypocritical businessman once told Twain, "Before I die I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I will climb to the top of Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud." "I have a better idea," Twain said drily, "Why don't you stay right at home in Boston and keep them?" At a dinner party, he was seated next to an extremely learned, bespectacled 'blue stocking' (a term for a female intellectual that would now be considered sexist) who sought to stun him with her knowledge, "Did you ever stop to think, Mr Twain, that sugar and sumac are the only words in our language with 'su' having the 'sh' sound?" He replied with a very straight face, "Are you quite sure?"

I had thought of writing something about Mark Twain this month as an anniversary tribute and in re-reading some of his anecdotes and others about him, I realised that they were even more apt in this time of financial crisis. He was as good at the homespun yarn as he was at the one-liner. He could spin out a story with a moral faster than you could say Abe Lincoln.

Big bonuses

Had Mark Twain been around with the AIG bailout and the big bonuses, he would have a lot to say about hogs and troughs. He also would have some pithy comments on handouts.

Twain was as fond of bankers as the Obama administration. He invented the story of a bank president who was proud of a glass eye that had been made for him by a great artist in Paris. "Twain, you need $5,000," he quoted the banker as saying. "I'll give it to you if you can guess which of my eyes is the glass one." Twain snapped, "It's the left one of course. It's the only one with a glint of human kindness in it."

I will end where I started with some of Twain's most memorable one-liners. "I am opposed to millionaires but it would be dangerous to offer me the position"; "I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting"; "Be careful of reading health books - you may die of a misprint"; and, in the old pre-porn and bikini days, "Clothes make the man - naked people have little or no influence on society."

Tony Deyal was last seen quoting his favourite Mark Twain one-liner, 'I never let my schooling interfere with my education'.