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 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 transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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

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