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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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 transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.

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

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.

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