James Thurber

Bekannte Zitate von James Thurber

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

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.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.

The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

Love is what you've been through with somebody.