James Thurber Quotes - Page 6

American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can.

My opposition to Interviews 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.

I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.

I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.

In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.

It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

God bless... God damn.

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.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.

What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'" "Nothing," said the Prince. "Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.

I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.

I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.

Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.

Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.

The paths of glory at least lead to the Grave, but the paths of duty may not get you Anywhere.

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.