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 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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Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
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Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.
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You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
James Thurber
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Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber
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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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Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen, and in which almost everything has.
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Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
James Thurber
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I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.
James Thurber
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Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
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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.
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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.
James Thurber
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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber
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God bless... God damn.
James Thurber
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I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.
James Thurber
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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.
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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Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber