James Thurber Quotes

One (martini) is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.

Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing.

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...

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl, but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.

Ne regardez pas en arrière avec colère,
ni devant avec crainte,
mais autour de vous avec conscience.

There was a smell, the Golux thought, a little like Forever in the air, but mixed with something faint and less enduring, possibly the fragrance of a flower.

Women are wiser than men, because they know less and understand more.

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?"

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

Hens embarrass me; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle...

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly — too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System — the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

"To call such persons "humorists", a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature."

The sharp edges of old reticences are softened in the autobiographer by the passing of time - a man does not pull the pillow over his head when he wakes in the morning because he suddenly remembers some awful thing that happened to him fifteen or twenty years ago, but the confusions and the panics of last year and the year before are too close for contentment. Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress and the careful ordering of event so necessary to a calm and balanced exposition of what, exactly, was the matter.