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 is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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.

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

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.

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.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

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.

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 is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.