A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
- James Thurber Quote
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
- James Thurber Quote
Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
- James Thurber Quote
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
Discussion in America means dissent.
- James Thurber Quote
Don't get it right, just get it written.
- James Thurber Quote
Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
- James Thurber Quote
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
- James Thurber Quote
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
- James Thurber Quote
I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
- James Thurber Quote
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
- James Thurber Quote
It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
- James Thurber Quote
Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
- James Thurber Quote
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
- James Thurber Quote
Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.
- James Thurber Quote
One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
- James Thurber Quote
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).
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
- James Thurber Quote
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
- James Thurber Quote
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.
- James Thurber Quote
There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
- James Thurber Quote
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
- James Thurber Quote
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.
- James Thurber Quote
We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
- James Thurber Quote
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
- James Thurber Quote
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
- James Thurber Quote
Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
- James Thurber Quote
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
- James Thurber Quote
