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

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.

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.

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.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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