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
art theatre acting
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
time artist years
A living is made, Mr Kemper, by selling something that everybody needs at least once a year.Yes, sir! And a million ismade by producing something that everybody needs every day.You artists produce something that nobody needs at any time.
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.
dream art routine
[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.
art secret desire
Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.
impulses land living loved memory necessary ourselves return shall
And we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,
employ fitted learned moral supremely theatre truth
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.''
summer boys sparrows
Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
country travel want
Only 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.
bring mixing woman
There's nothing like mixing with a woman to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense
above consciousness heads human knit law less practical primitive sea shelter smoke stretched temporary thousands tiny together wondering
The tiny tealeaf of consciousness spreads its bittersweet smoke through the sea of the primitive mind. Law is invented, then morality, then love, then forgiveness. Thousands and thousands of ideas, knit together over time, each one less practical and more ornamental than the last, all stretched taut above the wandering, wondering heads like a little pavilion; a temporary shelter for the human project.
human layers near race wherever
Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.
american-novelist cent danger fools great people per rest
Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
blank directors
Many plays-certainly mine-are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.