James Thurber Quotes

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddamn

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.

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'" "Nothing," said the Prince. "Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.

Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.

Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.

I have lived in the East for nearly thirty years now, but many of my books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.

A lady of 47 who has been married 27 years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody'.

Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

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.

We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.