In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I’ve never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.
Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.
If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine’s copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.
The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.
The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.
The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.
When my wife’s Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: ‘Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.’ I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.
It seemed to me that I should have a desk, even though I had no real need for a desk. I was afraid that if I had no desk in my room my life would seem too haphazard.
Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists-just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.
Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life’s dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.
It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear the bells, calling me to share God’s grace.
I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.
In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.
Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.
Life’s accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.
Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.
A right is a responsibility in reverse.
Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.