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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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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.
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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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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I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.
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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.
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
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you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life
Thornton Wilder
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When you're at war, you think about a better life when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.
Thornton Wilder
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
Thornton Wilder
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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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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
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Money is like manure it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
Thornton Wilder