James Thurber

Then, with that faint fleeting smile playingabout his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty, the undefeated, inscrutable to the last.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

The War Between Men and Women.

He doesn’t know anything except facts.

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio was the night the bed fellon my father.

All right, have it your way—you heard a sealbark!

[T]he 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.

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

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

Science has zipped the atom open in a dozen places, it can read the scrawlings on the Rosetta stone as glibly as a literary critic explains Hart Crane, but it doesn’t know anything about playwrights.

A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.

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.

Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is Man.

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms—hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

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.

So much has already been written about everything that you can’t find out anything about it.

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.

The human being says that the beast in him has been aroused, when what he actually means is that the human being in him has been aroused.

Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.

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.

Seeing is deceiving. It’s eating that’s believing.

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

Discussion in America means dissent.

Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.

A man’s bed is his cradle, but a woman’s is often her rack.

Most of the faint intimations of immortality of which we are occasionally aware would seem to arise out of Art or the materials of Art.

We [America] are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the belly laugh and the dozen other labels for the roll-’em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo.

This is the posture of fortune’s slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.

Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.

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

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

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.

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

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.