James Thurber (1894-1961)

James Grover Thurber was an American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist, and playwright. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University, leaving in 1918 without graduating. He spent over a year in Paris, working for the US State Department as a code clerk, and on his return to Columbus in 1920 was hired as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. He married his first wife, Althea Adams, in 1922. Thurber was hired by The New Yorker in early 1927, and soon became a prolific and popular contributor.

Quotes

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
Its better to know some of the questions, than all of the answers.
Early to rise and early to bed Makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead
A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
A woman's place is in the wrong.
I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.
I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

Humor
He wondered if he would kiss her and when he would kiss her and if she wanted to be kissed and if she were thinking of it, but she asked him what he would have to eat tonight at his hotel. He said clam chowder. Thursday, he said, they always have clam chowder. Is that the way you know it's Thursday, she said, or is that the way you know it's clam chowder?
Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.