Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilderwas an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the two plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth — and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth17 April 1897
CityMadison, WI
CountryUnited States of America
skeletons water rejection
Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.
healing doe essentials
What is essential does not die but clarifies.
bullying real perception
There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims; it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.
intelligence favors conditions
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
humor judging action
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
adventure wish tests
The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it say to yourself, Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish...
truth honesty world
There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
theatre moral action
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.'
play actors signatures
Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
beauty evil world
It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
suicide marketing different
In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
secret acting agents
If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.
race layers our-town
[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
adventure home wish
The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself "Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.