James Thurber (1894 – 1961)
American humorist and cartoonist.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make any sense.
Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with Man is Man.
Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
"Who are you?" the minstrel asked. "I am the Golux," said the Golux, proudly, "the only Golux in the world, and not a mere Device."
My opposition lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
One (martini) is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.
Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.
The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.
There are two kinds of light — the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.
Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. "The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; he was now browsing among the tulips.