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.

If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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