If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.
—James Thurber
Topics: Theater
Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dying, Death, Health
You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
—James Thurber
Topics: Risk, Balance, Persuasion
It’s better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Questioning, Questions, Thinking
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
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
Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
—James Thurber
Topics: Love
I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?
—James Thurber
Topics: Women, Men, Men & Women
Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness
—James Thurber
Topics: Awareness
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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
—James Thurber
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
—James Thurber
Topics: Self-Discovery
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.
—James Thurber
All men should strive to learn, before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
—James Thurber
Topics: Self-Discovery, Purpose, Discovery
Art—the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
—James Thurber
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one’s poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed—but never the husband).
—James Thurber
Topics: Class
Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
—James Thurber
Topics: Women
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: Age, Writing, Aging
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
—James Thurber
Topics: Conflict
Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humor
We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
—James Thurber
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
—James Thurber
Topics: Indecision
Precision of communication is important, more important than ever in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.
—James Thurber
Topics: Communication
Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
—James Thurber
Topics: Love
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
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
—James Thurber
Topics: Safety
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
—James Thurber
Topics: Comedy
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
Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
—James Thurber
Topics: Silence
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Questions