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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.

Thornton Wilder

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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Cases
Unhappy
Another
Essential
Form
Essentials
Convinced
Extraordinary
Atheism
Formation
Childhood
Exceptional
Except
Gifts

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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
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Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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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.
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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.
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I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps
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Every 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.
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
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If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.
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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.
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Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
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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.
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