Quotes By James Thurber

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

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.

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.

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.

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

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

Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.

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

The most dangerous food is wedding cake.

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

Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!

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.

Don't get it right, just get it written.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.

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

Discussion in America means dissent.

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

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

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

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

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

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

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

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.

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.

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 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.