“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”

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.

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

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.

Don’t get it right, just get it written.

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.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

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

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.

There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

Reason is 6/7 of treason.

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.

The world is a diamond cut from our surprise.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it.

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Success means participating fully in the conscious evolution of humanity, contributing to the shift in time to avoid the chaos and disasters foreseen.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

The aim of yoga is to calm the chaos of conflicting impulses.

Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.