Quote

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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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
Write
Livelihood
May
Surgeons
Many
Urge
Great
Urges
Writing
Humor
Way
Challenges
Good
Interesting
Surgeon
Hope
Operates

More quotes by 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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Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.
James Thurber
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Beautiful things don't ask for attention.
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 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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Don't get it right, just get it written.
James Thurber
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Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.
James Thurber
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This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
James Thurber
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There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
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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God bless... God damn.
James Thurber
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Dogs are obsessed with being happy.
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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Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
James Thurber
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It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.
James Thurber
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Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber
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The unicorn is a mythical beast.
James Thurber
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Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
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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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber