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

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

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

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.

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 lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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.