Thornton Wilder
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 two plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth — and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth17 April 1897
CityMadison, WI
CountryUnited States of America
rip hate house
How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world is a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
teach comparison
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
talking perspective people
Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.
friday july bridges
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
money differences world
The 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.
men mixing men-and-women
There's nothing like mixing with woman to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
years needs impatient
That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
country spring eye
People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.
art danger quarrels
One 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.
years people gazing
A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.
new-york growing-up book
People a thousand years from now - this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the 20th century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our living and in our dying.
character past razors
On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.
ephemeral adultery dentist
I am not interested in the ephemeral - such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.
eye secret influence
true influence over another comes not from a moments eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a lifetime's thoughts stored up in the eyes...the secret smile in the eyes of a friend