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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
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
Public
Earth
Masterpieces
Masterpiece
Intended
More quotes by Thornton Wilder
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
I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.
Thornton Wilder
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
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
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.
Thornton Wilder
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
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder
People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder
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
But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.
Thornton Wilder
I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
Thornton Wilder
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
For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
Thornton Wilder
The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder