James Thurber Quotes

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

The Duke is lamer than I am old, and I am shorter than he is cold, but it comes to you with some surprise that I am wiser than he is wise.

"You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

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.

Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.

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

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

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

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

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

"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.

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

The old man moaned and maundered, murmured, muttered, mumbled odds of this and ends of that, bits and pieces, shreds and edges, full of ifs and whens and theres and thens, amounting in the end and all to six times less than nothing.

Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.

I'll never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.