Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.