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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
Hide
Secret
Desire
Tell
Art
Time
More quotes by 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
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
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
Thornton Wilder
Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
Thornton Wilder
Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder
Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
Thornton Wilder
I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
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
For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
Money is like manure it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
Thornton Wilder
Heaven's my destination.
Thornton Wilder
How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
Thornton Wilder
Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
Thornton Wilder
Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Thornton Wilder
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
the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.
Thornton Wilder
