Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder
Image
There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps
Thornton Wilder
Image
There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
Image
He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The 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 Wilder
Image
Doctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Heaven's my destination.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
Thornton Wilder