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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.

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
Writing
Things
Glare
Glow
Transparency
Revealing
Effective
Equal
Justice

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Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.
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It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
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Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
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Let the meek inherit the earth -- they have it coming to them.
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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.
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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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We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
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Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
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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.
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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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I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.
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Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
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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.
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There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
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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.
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God bless... God damn.
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She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.
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The unicorn is a mythical beast.
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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.
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For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.
James Thurber