James Thurber Quotes

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

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

"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)."

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

"Early to rise and early to bed Makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead"

"Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness."

"Whether it's a crisis or not depends on how long these high prices are sustained."

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

"Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober."

"Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years."

"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."

"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."

"There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else."

"The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road."

"Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead."

"Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything."

"There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception."

"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 past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess"

"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."