Quotes from James Thurber

The story of Harold Ross, the New Yorker and me is a mere footnote to the story of our time, and we might as well face the truth that to researchers of the future, poking about among the ruins of time, we shall all be tiny glitters. But then, so are diamonds.

I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unseasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.

A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.

He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

Let us not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around us in awareness.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

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

There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.

Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

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

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

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

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

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

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.

Don't get it right, get it written.

Love is what you've been through with somebody

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

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.

I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.