James Thurber
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.
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
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.
Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
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.
Beautiful things don't ask for attention.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Life
History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.Collection: Government
She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.Collection: Thinking
A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.Collection: Communication
Women deserve to have more than 12 years between 28 and 40.Collection: Years
I never had a dog that showed a human fear of death. Death, to a dog, is the final unavoidable compulsion, the least ineluctable scent on a fearsome trail, but they like to face it alone, going out into the woods, among the leaves, if there are any leaves when their time comes, enduring without sentimental human distraction the Last Loneliness, which they are wise enough to know cannot be shared by anyone.Collection: Death
A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.Collection: Pounds
Americans want to go to heaven without dying.Collection: Heaven
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.Collection: Humor
So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.Collection: Knowledge
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.Collection: Fun
I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.Collection: Dog
I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A and Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean - 187,796,132, if it would interest you.Collection: Distance
The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.Collection: Generations
Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.Collection: Party
A lady of 47 who has been married 27 years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody'.Collection: Love
But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.Collection: Real
I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.Collection: Eight
A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.Collection: Responsibility
Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.Collection: Humor
Let the meek inherit the earth -- they have it coming to them.Collection: Funny
The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.Collection: Fun
Reason is 6/7 of treason.Collection: Reason
Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.Collection: Memories
Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.Collection: Years
I have lived in the East for nearly thirty years now, but many of my books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.Collection: Dream
Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.Collection: Tragedy
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling 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?'Collection: Writing
Looks can be deceiving; it's eating that's believing.Collection: Believe
If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.Collection: Sex
Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dogCollection: Dog
We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. 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.Collection: Laughter
Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light. We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think." But I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.Collection: Thinking
Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advisedCollection: Art
Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.Collection: Children
Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.Collection: Laughter
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.Collection: Book
I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.Collection: Running