James Thurber Quotes
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But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
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The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
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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 night. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
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I hate women because they always know where things are.
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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).
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He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
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Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
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I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.
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When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
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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.
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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.
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Discussion in America means dissent.
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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.
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Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
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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.
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It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
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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.
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A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.
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The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
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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.
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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.
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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
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Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddam. sic
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Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!