It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”

Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.