Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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

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

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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.

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