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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

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.

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

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 is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

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

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.