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

In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.

God bless... God damn.

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.

A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.

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.