James Thurber the Comedian, biography, facts and quotes

"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility"

"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"

"The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess"

"Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision"

"Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man"

"There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception"

"The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel"

"The most dangerous food is wedding cake"

"The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal"

"The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his"

"Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything"

"Don't get it right, just get it written"

"Discussion in America means dissent"

"Love is what you've been through with somebody"

"I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere"

"Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?"

"Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!"

"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"

"A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense"

"Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person"

"Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead"

"But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?"

"Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years"

"All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why"

"A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption"

"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature"

"The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep"

"Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness"

"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"

"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"

"I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance"

"He who hesitates is sometimes saved"

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time"

"The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth"

"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)"

"It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all"

"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"

"There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures"

"The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals"