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

More quotes by James Thurber

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Love is what you've been through with somebody.
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I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good, the Golux said, by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life. The firefly's ? said the minstrel. The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.
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I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
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Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.
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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.
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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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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
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For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.
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You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
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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.
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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.
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Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
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Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.
James Thurber
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Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
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There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
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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.
James Thurber
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Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog
James Thurber
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Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.
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The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
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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