Quote

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.

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
Home
Routine
Perils
Littles
Escape
Snap
Little
Office
Snaps
Always
Ready
Pathways
People
Turn
Settled
Turns
Peril
Living
Houses
Tangent
House
Sudden
Unplanned

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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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I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.
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Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
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Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.
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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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Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
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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.
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I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as all righty and yes indeedy and hundreds of others.
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Looks can be deceiving it's eating that's believing.
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Reason is 6/7 of treason.
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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 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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A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
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If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
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The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
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So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
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The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
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Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
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You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
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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.
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