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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.

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
Knew
Stein
Lost
Gertrude
Night
Hemingway
Home
Stayed
Right
Weren
Generation
Generations
Wouldn

More quotes by James Thurber

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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.
James Thurber
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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?'
James Thurber
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I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
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.
James Thurber
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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
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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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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
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The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber
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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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The wit makes fun of other persons the satirist makes fun of the world the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
James Thurber
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He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
James Thurber
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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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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.
James Thurber
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A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
James Thurber
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A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
James Thurber
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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?
James Thurber
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I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber
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I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.
James Thurber