Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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

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.

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

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

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.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

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 lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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.

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.