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James Thurber
67 quotes
“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.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to A Thurber Garland (1955)
“Women are wiser than men, because they know less and understand more.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in: Kabir, Hajara Muhammad (2010). Northern women development. [Nigeria]. ISBN 978-978-906-469-4. OCLC 890820657.
“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.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter, March 11, 1954, to Malcolm Cowley. Collecting Himself (1989)
“With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in New York Post (30 June 1955)
“The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms — hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New York Times Magazine (7 December 1958).
“I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)
“When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)
“Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, "How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?" and avoid "How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)
“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.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Television interview with Edward R. Murrow on TV show Small World, CBS-TV (25 March 1959); transcript published in New York Post
“We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in New York Times (21 February 1960).
“If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in The New York Times (21 February 1960)
“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in New York Post (29 February 1960)
“My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview, Life Magazine (New York, March 14, 1960).
“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.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted from an an interview with Glenna Syse in Time Magazine (New York, 15 August 1960); Times editors corrected Thurber's arithmetic
“One [martini] is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Time "People, Aug. 15, 1960" (New York, 15 August 1960) from an interview with Glenna Syse of the .
“My opposition 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 (1894–1961) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Henry Brandon after an interview with him, explaining his opposition to interviews; quoted by Brandon in As We Are (1961)
“The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.”
James Thurber (1894–1961) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in The Observer (London, 5 February 1961).