Thornton Wilder (1897 – 1975)
American author and playwright.
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.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
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."
The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous...and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight.
Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.
Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners — your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards — who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
People are meant to go through life two by two. 'Tain't natural to be lonesome.
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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.
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate — that's my philosophy.
I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that 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. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater.
The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.
Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.
Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.
We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.