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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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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
Lost
Tried
Alps
Trying
Case
Nineteen
Would
Theater
Crossing
Cases
Crossings
Worst
Playwright
Since
Elephants
Snowstorm
Everybody
Count
Snowstorms
Eye
Theatre
Hannibal

More quotes by James Thurber

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Reason is 6/7 of treason.
James Thurber
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You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
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Love is what you've been through with somebody.
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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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Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
James Thurber
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Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
James Thurber
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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
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The unicorn is a mythical beast.
James Thurber
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Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.
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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The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
James Thurber
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He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
James Thurber
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Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
James Thurber
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Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber
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Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
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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Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
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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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
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I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
James Thurber