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

I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.