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Quotes by James Thurber


Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
– James Thurber
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
– James Thurber
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
– James Thurber
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
– James Thurber
All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
– James Thurber
Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
– James Thurber
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
– James Thurber
Discussion in America means dissent.
– James Thurber
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
– James Thurber
From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. After dinner, the men moved into the living room. I explained to the professor that this was Rose' way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.
– James Thurber
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
– James Thurber
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
– James Thurber
Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.
– James Thurber
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
– 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
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
– James Thurber
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.
– James Thurber
It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
– James Thurber
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
– James Thurber
Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
– James Thurber
Love is what you've been through with somebody.
– 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
My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
– James Thurber
My opposition to Interviews 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
No other editor has ever been lost and saved so often in the course of a working week. When his heart leaped up, it leaped a long way, because it started from so far down, and its commutings over the years from the depths to the heights made Ross a specialist in appreciation.
– James Thurber
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.
– James Thurber
One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
– James Thurber
Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
– 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
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
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.
– 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
The chill Miss Trent has her men frustrated to a point at which a mortal male would smack her little mouth, so smooth, so firm, so free of nicotine, alcohol and emotion.
– James Thurber
The story of Harold Ross, the New Yorker and me is a mere footnote to the story of our time, and we might as well face the truth that to researchers of the future, poking about among the ruins of time, we shall all be tiny glitters. But then, so are diamonds.
– James Thurber
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
– James Thurber
There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
– James Thurber
There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
– James Thurber
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.
– James Thurber
Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
– James Thurber
We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
– James Thurber
With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
– James Thurber
Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
– James Thurber
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
– James Thurber
Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.
– James Thurber
I hate women because they always know where things are.
– James Thurber
I loathe the expression What makes him tick. It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, 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.
– James Thurber
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
– James Thurber
I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.
– James Thurber
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
– James Thurber
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
– James Thurber
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.
– James Thurber
The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
– 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 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.
– 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