Many plays – certainly mine – are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
About 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 plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.
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More quotes from Thornton Wilder
Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
A play visibly represents pure existing.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Many plays – certainly mine – are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
The best thing about animals is that they don’t talk much.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she’s a householder.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
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.’
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)
If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a secret agent.
American playwright and novelist (1897-1975)