Quotes by James Thurber

I’m 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I’d only be 48. That’s the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.

The most dangerous food is wedding cake.

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.

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.

The wit makes fun of other persons the satirist makes fun of the world the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people – that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

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

Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.

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.