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.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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.

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 lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

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

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.

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

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.

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.