Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.

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.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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

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.

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.

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