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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
Way
Challenges
Good
Interesting
Surgeon
Hope
Operates
Write
Livelihood
May
Surgeons
Many
Urge
Great
Urges
Writing
Humor
More quotes by James Thurber
So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
James Thurber
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
The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell
James Thurber
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
James Thurber
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.
James Thurber
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.
James Thurber
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
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.
James Thurber
Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
James Thurber
Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber
Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
James Thurber
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
God bless... God damn.
James Thurber
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
James Thurber
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
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
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
James Thurber
Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
James Thurber
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
History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.
James Thurber