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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Comedy, Wit
With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
—James Thurber
Topics: Writing, Age, Aging
The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
—James Thurber
Topics: Economics, Economy
It’s better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Questioning, Questions, Thinking
Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.
—James Thurber
Topics: Language
Art—the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
—James Thurber
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
—James Thurber
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
—James Thurber
Topics: Trust, Lies, Lying
My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
—James Thurber
Topics: Drawing, The Artist
Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
—James Thurber
Topics: Women
The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dogs
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
—James Thurber
Topics: Thought, Thinking
Discussion in America means dissent.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dissent
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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Haste, Speed
Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
—James Thurber
Topics: Love
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Questions
Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.
—James Thurber
In his grief over the loss of a dog. a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood.
—James Thurber
From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. “After dinner, the men moved into the living room.” I explained to the professor that this was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.
—James Thurber
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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humor
Boys are beyond the range of anybody’s sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
—James Thurber
Topics: Youth
All men should strive to learn, before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
—James Thurber
Topics: Purpose, Discovery, Self-Discovery
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, “How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?” and avoid “How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?”
—James Thurber
Topics: Authors & Writing
This is the posture of fortune’s slaves: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
—James Thurber
Topics: Fortune
The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
—James Thurber
Topics: Apathy
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
—James Thurber
Topics: Tourism, Flying, Travel
He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him.
—James Thurber
Topics: Attitude
Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
—James Thurber
Topics: Love
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
—James Thurber
Topics: Books, Reading
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess
—James Thurber
Topics: Future
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