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 THURBERI 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.
More James Thurber Quotes
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Looks can be deceiving; it’s eating that’s believing.
JAMES THURBER -
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
JAMES THURBER -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
JAMES THURBER -
For one thing, she pronounced flowers ‘flars’ and I couldn’t let it slide.
JAMES THURBER -
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.
JAMES THURBER -
The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals
JAMES THURBER -
A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.
JAMES THURBER -
Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
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.
JAMES THURBER -
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 -
One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
JAMES THURBER -
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
JAMES THURBER