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.

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

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.

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.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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.

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

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.

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

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

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.