We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
—James Thurber
Topics: Laughter, Audiences
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
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: Aging, Writing, Age
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: Flying, Travel, Tourism
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: Speed, Haste
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
—James Thurber
Topics: Conflict
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
Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.
—James Thurber
Topics: Wit, Humor
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humor
This is the posture of fortune’s slaves: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
—James Thurber
Topics: Fortune
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Questions
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
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
Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else?
—James Thurber
Topics: Conformity
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
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
—James Thurber
Topics: Trust, Lies, Lying
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
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
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
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
A peril of the night road is that flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front edge of barges, and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring.
—James Thurber
Topics: Driving
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people—that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humor
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
—James Thurber
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
—James Thurber
Topics: Love
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
—James Thurber
I’m 65 and I guess that puts me in the geriatrics. But if there were 15 months in the year, I’d only be 48. That’s the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40.
—James Thurber
Topics: Age, Aging, Women
Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
—James Thurber
Topics: Silence
All men should strive to learn, before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
—James Thurber
Topics: Purpose, Self-Discovery, Discovery
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