James Thurber Quotes
Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.
Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.
I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.
Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.
It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.
My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.
There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.
I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.
The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.
The paths of glory at least lead to the Grave, but the paths of duty may not get you Anywhere.
You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.
