I cannot live without books, but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.

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.

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.