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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
Great
Urges
Writing
Humor
Way
Challenges
Good
Interesting
Surgeon
Hope
Operates
Write
Livelihood
May
Surgeons
Many
Urge
More quotes by James Thurber
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
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
James Thurber
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
James Thurber
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
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
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
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 trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.
James Thurber
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
James Thurber
Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
James Thurber
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
James Thurber
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
James Thurber
Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
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
American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can.
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
Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
James Thurber
I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
James Thurber
No male can beat a female in the long run because they have it over us in sheer, damn longevity.
James Thurber
Looks can be deceiving it's eating that's believing.
James Thurber
