James Thurber Quotes

121 Sourced Quotes

But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

James Thurber
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.

James Thurber
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.

James Thurber
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

James Thurber
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
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
It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.

James Thurber
The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.

James Thurber
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

James Thurber
Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.

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

James Thurber
I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every 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 twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

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

James Thurber
"I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good," the Golux said, "by accident and happen chance. 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."

James Thurber
My opposition lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.

James Thurber
Somebody once said that I am incapable of drawing a man, but that I draw abstract things like despair, disillusion, despondency, sorrow, lapse of memory, exile, and that these things are sometimes in a shape that might be called Man or Woman.

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

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

James Thurber
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.

James Thurber
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