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

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.

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.