Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

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

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.

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).

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.

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

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.

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

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.