Quotes By James Thurber

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

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.

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

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

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

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

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

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