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

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

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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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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I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
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That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
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On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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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.
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
Thornton Wilder
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Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
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Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
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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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If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.
Thornton Wilder
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder