James Thurber Quotes on Writing
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Don't get it right, just get it written.
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He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: 'After dinner, the men moved into the living room,' and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all night. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
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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.
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With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
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When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
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Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'
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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.
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My opposition lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
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Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.
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So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
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Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
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Yes, my works lose something in the original.