A biography for James Thurberhasn’t been written yet.
“מרטיני אחד זה בסדר, שניים זה יותר מדי, שלושה זה לא מספיק.”
“עדיף לדעת חלק מן השאלות מאשר את כל התשובות.”
“Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.”
“I'll never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.”
“Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.”
“All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.”
“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”
“Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.”
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
“She has a memory of trees and fields and nothing more.”
“Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.”
“Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.”
“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.”
“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Discussion in America means dissent.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”