I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say—your professional poets, I mean—there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

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

If a king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.

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

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.

I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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 transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.

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.

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