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

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”