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

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”

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

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.

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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.

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 transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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 our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

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