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

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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.
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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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So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
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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.
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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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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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A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
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I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.
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We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
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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.
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Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
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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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Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
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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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There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
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Love is what you've been through with somebody.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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