Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

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.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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

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.

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

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

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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