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

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

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.

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

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

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

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

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

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 is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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