I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

A man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.... I was all asprawl, clinging to Beauty, which is a very restless trellis.

The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn't as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war's consequences.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious.

Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.

Books are the door of escape from the forest.