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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.

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
Helping
Value
Perpetuate
Facts
Expression
Oral
Give
Grace
Decline
Littles
Answers
Interviews
Little
Lying
Opposition
Take
Values
Helps
Giving
Fact
English
Language
Lies
Offhand

More quotes by James Thurber

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I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
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I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
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I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
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Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.
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The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
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Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
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Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
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He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
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Dogs are obsessed with being happy.
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The wit makes fun of other persons the satirist makes fun of the world the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
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The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
James Thurber
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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
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Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
James Thurber
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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
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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.
James Thurber
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Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
James Thurber
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The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber
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Don't get it right, just get it written.
James Thurber
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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber