Top 160 James Thurber Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.”

— James Thurber

102. “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.”

— James Thurber

103. “Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.”

— James Thurber

104. “A wet dog is lovingest.”

— James Thurber

105. “Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.”

— James Thurber

106. “I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn’t monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.”

— James Thurber

107. “Most of the faint intimations of immortality of which we are occasionally aware would seem to arise out of Art or the materials of Art.”

— James Thurber

108. “Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.”

— James Thurber

109. “I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.”

— James Thurber

110. “American girls often marry someone they can’t stand to spite someone they can.”

— James Thurber

111. “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.”

— James Thurber

112. “At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

114. “When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.”

— James Thurber

115. “Love is blind, but desire just doesn’t give a good goddamn.”

— James Thurber

116. “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.”

— James Thurber

117. “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.”

— James Thurber

118. “The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they’ve been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy.”

— James Thurber

119. “Remember laughter. You’ll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.”

— James Thurber

120. “Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.”

— James Thurber

121. “The noblest study of mankind is Man, says Man.”

— James Thurber

122. “It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.”

— James Thurber

123. “But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?”

— James Thurber

124. “The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.”

— James Thurber

125. “All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.”

— James Thurber

126. “When man gives up on reforming and inspiring society he also gives up his freedom.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

128. “Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.”

— James Thurber

129. “I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.”

— James Thurber

130. “You’ll never live to wed his niece. You’ll only die to feed his geese.”

— James Thurber

131. “Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

133. “We all have flaws,” he said, “and mine is being wicked.”

— James Thurber

134. “Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.”

— James Thurber

135. “It is all but impossible to sit quietly by when someone is throwing salad plates.”

— James Thurber

136. “It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. ‘I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,’ said Lisa.”

— James Thurber

137. “Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.”

— James Thurber

138. “No male can beat a female in the long run because they have it over us in sheer, damn longevity.”

— James Thurber

139. “I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.”

— James Thurber

140. “Men are more interesting than women, but women ae more fascinating.”

— James Thurber

141. “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.”

— James Thurber

142. “You have made the moon,” The Jester said. “That is the moon.”

— James Thurber

143. “Geep,′ whuppled the parrot.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

145. “At least she’s not guilty of integrity, and that’s more than I can say of any Bell in four generations except my grandfather and myself.”

— James Thurber

146. “Discussion in America means dissent.”

— James Thurber

147. “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.”

— James Thurber

148. “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.”

— James Thurber

149. “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.”

— James Thurber

150. “People who do not understand pigeons – and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them – should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons.”

— James Thurber