Quotes By Thornton Wilder

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

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 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.'

In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.

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.

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

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.

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

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

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

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

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

A play visibly represents pure existing.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

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

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.

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

Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.

An incinerator is a writer's best friend.