Quote

Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.

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
Fast
Graphic
Somewhere
Urge
Comedy
Urges
Virtue
Composition
Getting
Native
American
Curious
Satisfies
Sense
Rewards
Noblest
Speed
Scarcely

More quotes by James Thurber

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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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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.
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The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell
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Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
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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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It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
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Reason is 6/7 of treason.
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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.
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When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
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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?'
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But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
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I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.
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You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
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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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Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
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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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The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
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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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The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
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