Quotes from James Thurber

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.

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

Ride close together. Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people – that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

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

Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.

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

The most dangerous food is wedding cake.

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.

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.

Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.

Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.

(Cartoon caption:) I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.

I have always thought of a dog lover as a dog that was in love with another dog.

God bless... God damn.

It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.

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.

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.

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

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.

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

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.