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.

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

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

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.

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 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.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

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.

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.

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

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.