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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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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Secret
Desire
Tell
Art
Time
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More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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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.
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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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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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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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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Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
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All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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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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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.
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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
Thornton Wilder
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
Thornton Wilder