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Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
James Thurber
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James Thurber
Age: 66 †
Born: 1894
Born: December 18
Died: 1961
Died: November 2
Autobiographer
Cartoonist
Drawer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Columbus
Ohio
James Grover Thurber
Comedy
Hilarious
Answers
Witty
Called
Phone
Wrong
Phones
Funny
Conflict
Wells
Answer
Well
Number
Numbers
More quotes by James Thurber
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.
James Thurber
Beautiful things don't ask for attention.
James Thurber
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
James Thurber
I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.
James Thurber
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'
James Thurber
Dogs are obsessed with being happy.
James Thurber
If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.
James Thurber
Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed - but never the husband).
James Thurber
The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
James Thurber
Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
James Thurber
Don't get it right, just get it written.
James Thurber
The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
James Thurber
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber
I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.
James Thurber
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
James Thurber
Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
James Thurber
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
James Thurber
I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.
James Thurber
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
James Thurber
Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.
James Thurber