Thornton Wilder Quotes

There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

Art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.

Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a secret agent.

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.

Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.

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.’

Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.

An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?

The best thing about animals is that they don’t talk much.

When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

Many plays – certainly mine – are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she’s a householder.

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.

When you’re safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

Providence has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something high or good. A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.

But there comes a moment in everybody’s life when he must decide whether he’ll live among the human beings or not – a fool among fools or a fool alone.

Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?

The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.