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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.