James Thurber Quotes

If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.

I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.

Men are more interesting than women, but women ae more fascinating.

Looks can be deceiving; it's eating that's believing.

If you are a police dog, where's your badge?

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.

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.

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.

The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.

The unicorn is a mythical beast.

I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good," the Golux said, "by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life." "The firefly's ?" said the minstrel. "The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.

The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell

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.

I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.

Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.

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.

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.

Women deserve to have more than 12 years between 28 and 40.

A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.

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

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

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.

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.

A wet dog is lovingest.

My grandmother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up, she would fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but dangerous leakage. nothing could ever clear this up for her.

Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.

This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.

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).

Discussion in America means dissent.

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

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.

I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, 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.

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

No male can beat a female in the long run because they have it over us in sheer, damn longevity.

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.

If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.

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.