James Thurber Quotes

121 Sourced Quotes

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

James Thurber
The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

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

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
If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

James Thurber
Boys are perhaps beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of eighteen months and ninety years.

James Thurber
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.

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

James Thurber
One (martini) is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.

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

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

James Thurber
They sit on the edge of literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats. Afraid of losing themselves in the larger flight of the two-volume novel, or even the one-volume novel, they stick to short accounts of their misadventures because they never get so deep into them that they feel they can get out.

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

James Thurber
Red Barber announces the Dodger games and he uses those expressions—picked them up down South.... "Tearing up the pea patch" means going on a rampage; "sitting in the catbird seat" means sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him.

James Thurber
A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.

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
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.

James Thurber
Having a manuscript under Ross's scrutiny was like putting your car in the hands of a skilled mechanic, not an automotive engineer with a bachelor of science degree, but a guy who knows what makes a motor go, and sputter, and wheeze, and sometimes comes to a dead stop; a man with an ear for the faintest body squeak as well as the loudest engine rattle.

James Thurber
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

James Thurber
It's a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

James Thurber
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

James Thurber
Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit.

James Thurber
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

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

James Thurber
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

James Thurber
He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: "After dinner, the men moved into the living room," and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all night. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

James Thurber
But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.

James Thurber
All right, have it your own way—you heard a seal bark!
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James Thurber