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The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.

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
Average
Mutter
Months
Banquet
Sleep
Banquets
Lasts
Speaker
Half
Speakers
Two
Sanity
Ends
Calls
Time
Begins

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Dogs are obsessed with being happy.
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Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
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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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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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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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For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.
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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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Let the meek inherit the earth -- they have it coming to them.
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Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
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I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
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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.
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If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
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There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
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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.
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We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
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Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
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You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
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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 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.
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