JAMES THURBER: Did you read the French translation?

READER: No, I read it in English.

THURBER: That explains it. It suffers greatly in the original.

[This was told me by my father. I can't find a published source, and a web search doesn't turn up anything similar. My father interviewed Thurber once, but this isn't from the version that was published, and it doesn't sound like something Thurber would have told about himself. Epistemic status: probably apocryphal.]