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I loathe the expression What makes him tick. It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, 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.
-James Thurber
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Age
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With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
-James Thurber
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I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.
-James Thurber
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.
-James Thurber
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Anger
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Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
-James Thurber
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Apathy
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The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
-James Thurber
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Art
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Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
-James Thurber
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Artist, The
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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
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A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
-James Thurber
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Attitude
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He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him.
-James Thurber
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Authors & Writing
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Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling 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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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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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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Character
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While he was not as dumb as an ox, he was not any smarter either.
-James Thurber
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Class
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Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed -- but never the husband).
-James Thurber
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Comedy
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The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
-James Thurber
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Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
-James Thurber
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Conflict
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Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
-James Thurber
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Conformity & Nonconformity
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Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else?
-James Thurber
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Death
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But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
-James Thurber
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Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
-James Thurber
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Dignity
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Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.
-James Thurber
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Dissent
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Discussion in America means dissent.
-James Thurber
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Driving
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A peril of the night road is that flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front edge of barges, and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring.
-James Thurber, on driving with poor eyesight
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Economics
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The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
-James Thurber
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Books by and about James Thurber