James Thurber

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

"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 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs."

"The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms — hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal."

"I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method."

"When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare."

"Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, "How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?" and avoid "How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?""

"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."

"We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves."

"If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps."

"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility."

"My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point."

"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."

"One [martini] is all right, two is too many, three is not enough."

"My opposition 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."

"Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. "The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; he was now browsing among the tulips."

"Don't count your boobies until they are hatched."

"He who hesitates is sometimes saved."

"Don't get it right, just get it written."

"It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all."

"Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation."

"Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddam. [sic]"

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

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

"All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why."

"Moral: Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going."

"The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa."

""To hell with the handkerchief," said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last."

"Who are you?" the minstrel asked. "I am the Golux," said the Golux, proudly, "the only Golux in the world, and not a mere Device."

"Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light ... We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think." ..., but I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness."

"Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act."

"There are two kinds of light — the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures."

"Boys are perhaps beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of eighteen months and ninety years."

"A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps."

"Now I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance — a sharp, vindictive glance."

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

"Discussion in America means dissent."

"Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right."

"If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on."

"Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable."

"It is true, I confess, that if a male character of my invention started across the stage to disrobe a virgin criminally (ah, euphemism to end euphemisms!), he would probably catch his foot in the piano stool and end up playing "Button Up Your Overcoat" on the black keys."

"She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house."

"In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter."

"I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed."

"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."

"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."

"I am not a dog lover. A dog lover to me means a dog that is in love with another dog."

"He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: "After dinner, the men moved into the living room," and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all right. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up."

"From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing."