If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good
Thornton WilderOnly it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
Thornton WilderWe live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
Thornton WilderA sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
Thornton WilderMan is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day
Thornton WilderNow he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.
Thornton Wilderthe whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.
Thornton WilderI have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps
Thornton WilderThe 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.'
Thornton WilderThe planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
Thornton WilderMy advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton WilderThe difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.
Thornton WilderThose who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
Thornton WilderThe condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
Thornton WilderEvery 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.
Thornton WilderThat’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN
Thornton WilderThe knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.
Thornton WilderLife is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
Thornton WilderMany great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.
Thornton WilderThe 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.
Thornton WilderLeadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton WilderI want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?
Thornton WilderThere is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thornton WilderIt is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
Thornton WilderThere is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
Thornton WilderBeing employed is like being loved: you know that somebody's thinking about you the whole time.
Thornton WilderThere are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.
Thornton WilderI 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.
Thornton WilderBut such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.
Thornton WilderThroughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Thornton WilderOne of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.
Thornton Wilder