Well, someone once wrote a definition of the difference between English and American humor. I wish I could remember his name. I thought his definition very good. He said that the English treat the commonplace as if it were remarkable and the Americans treat the remarkable as if it were commonplace.
Authors James Thurber
Fred Palumbo
-
-
His mind was never at rest, and his pencil was connected to his mind by the best conductive tissue I have ever seen in action.
James Thurber
E. B. White
-
If Thurber can talk as well as he writes he must be one of the greatest and least boring talkers.
Ernest Hemingway
James Thurber’s opinions on others
-
Everybody wants to know if I’ve learned from Mark Twain. Actually I’ve never read much of him. I did buy Tom Sawyer, but dammit, I’m sorry, I’ve not got around to reading it all the way through.
-
He was a strong influence, and for a long time in the beginning I thought he might be too much of one. But at least he got me away from a rather curious style I was starting to perfect—tight journalese laced with heavy doses of Henry James.
-
James is like—well, I had a bulldog once who used to drag rails around, enormous ones—six-, eight-, twelve-foot rails. He loved to get them in the middle and you’d hear him growling out there, trying to bring the thing home. Once he brought home a chest of drawers—without the drawers in it. Found it on an ash-heap. Well, he’d start to get these things in the garden gate, everything finely balanced, you see, and then crash, he’d come up against the gate posts. He’d get it through finally, but I had that feeling in some of the James novels: that he was trying to get that rail through a gate not wide enough for it.
-
Wolfe once told me at a cocktail party that I didn’t know what it was to be a writer. My wife, standing next to me, complained about that. “But my husband is a writer,” she said. Wolfe was genuinely surprised. “He is?”
Mark Twain
E. B. White
Henry James
Thomas Wolfe