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He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

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
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Art

More quotes by James Thurber

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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.
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.
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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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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.
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There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.
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Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber
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Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
James Thurber
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Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.
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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The unicorn is a mythical beast.
James Thurber
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The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber
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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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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.
James Thurber
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Let the meek inherit the earth -- they have it coming to them.
James Thurber
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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.
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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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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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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A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
James Thurber