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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

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
Like
Plays
Mines
Mine
Directors
Certainly
Actors
Signatures
Play
Blank
Many
Checks

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A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
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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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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
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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.
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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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Money is like manure it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
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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.
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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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Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.
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Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
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There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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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.
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you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life
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I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
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Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
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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.
Thornton Wilder