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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

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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
Process
Processes
Become
Therapy
Kind
Mental
Challenge
Drug
Humor
Tranquilizing
Comedy
Ceased
Challenges
Relaxation

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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.
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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
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I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
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This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
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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.
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When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
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Don't get it right, just get it written.
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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.
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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.
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He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
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The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
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In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.
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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.
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Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
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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?'
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Love is what you've been through with somebody.
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There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
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Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.
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Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
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The unicorn is a mythical beast.
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