“I 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.”

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

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.

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

Humourists lead… an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.

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 trouble with the lost generation is that it didn’t get lost enough.

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

Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.

I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.

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

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

But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.

Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.

If I get to know somebody, I’ll open up, but other than that I like to sit back and observe things.

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I am torn in two.

I hate and love. And why, perhaps you’ll ask. I don’t know: but I feel, and I’m tormented.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.

I think the greatest lesson I have just recently learned is how powerful the mind is, informing our decision making unknowingly.