With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs. - (Thurber, James - Age and Aging)

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. - (Thurber, James - Age and Aging)

It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home. - (Thurber, James - Alcohol and Alcoholism)

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness. - (Thurber, James - Anger)

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic. - (Thurber, James - Apathy)

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised. - (Thurber, James - Arts and Artists)

He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him. - (Thurber, James - Attitude)

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method. - (Thurber, James - Books - Reading)

We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves. - (Thurber, James - Broadway)

While he was not as dumb as an ox, he was not any smarter either. - (Thurber, James - Character)

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel. - (Thurber, James - Comedy and Comedians)

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. - (Thurber, James - Comedy and Comedians)

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone? - (Thurber, James - Conflict)

Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else? - (Thurber, James - Conformity)

Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies -- and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern. - (Thurber, James - Cosmos)