Explore Quotes by James Thurber

Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.

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

We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.

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.

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

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

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

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

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

These are the days of bootleg love.

Quick, name some towns in New Jersey

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).

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.

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.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.

My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

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.

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

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