James Thurber

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

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.

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

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

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.

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.

These are the days of bootleg love.

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

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

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.

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

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.

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.

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

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

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

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 wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.