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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

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

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.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.