Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

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.”

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.

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

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

I cannot live without books, but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

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.

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.

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

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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.