Quote

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

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
Hide
Secret
Desire
Tell
Art
Time

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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
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
Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
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.
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
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
Image
Money is like manure it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
Thornton Wilder
Image
There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
Thornton Wilder
Image
For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
Image
Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
Thornton Wilder
Image
[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
Thornton Wilder