Quote

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

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
Every
General
Sentence
Skeleton
Like
Activity
Rejection
Iceberg
Writer
Sentences
Skeletons
Principles
Enormous
Accompanied
Beauty
Necessarily
Concerning
Water
Critics
Governed
Force
Nine
Critic
Truth
Criticism
Selection
Tenths

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
Thornton Wilder
Image
I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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
Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
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
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
Thornton Wilder
Image
What is essential does not die but clarifies.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
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
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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