I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.
I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
Don’t get it right, just get it written.
I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?
I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.
Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen, and in which almost everything has.
A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.
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.
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I’ve not seen!