Thornton Wilder: Trending quotes

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Thornton Wilder: 122 quotes11 likes

“Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of the whole city.”

Thornton Wilder The Matchmaker

Malachi, in Act 3
The Matchmaker (1954)

“Many plays — certainly mine — are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.”

Thornton Wilder

The New York Mirror (13 July 1956)

“I am not interested in the ephemeral — such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.”

Thornton Wilder

The New York Times (6 November 1961)

“The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous…and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight.”

Thornton Wilder The Matchmaker

The Matchmaker (1954)

“The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.”

Thornton Wilder The Matchmaker

Barnaby, in Act 4
The Matchmaker (1954)

“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

Writers at Work interview (1958)

“Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants' Ball or even write a book, if that's what they want to do.”

Thornton Wilder book Theophilus North

Theophilus North (1973)

“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”

Thornton Wilder

TIME magazine (12 January 1953)

“Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.”

Thornton Wilder The Matchmaker

Vandergelder, in Act 1
The Matchmaker (1954)

“Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.”

Thornton Wilder book The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

“The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action."”

Thornton Wilder

Writers at Work interview (1958)

“The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.”

Thornton Wilder

Writers at Work interview (1958)

“Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.”

Thornton Wilder

TIME magazine (3 February 1958)

“I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.”

Thornton Wilder

New York Journal-American (11 November 1955)

“Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.”

Thornton Wilder book The Eighth Day

The Eighth Day (1967)

“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

Writers at Work interview (1958)

“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

Writers at Work interview (1958)

“A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.”

Thornton Wilder book The Eighth Day

The Eighth Day (1967)

“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

Writers at Work interview (1958)

“Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.”

Thornton Wilder book The Eighth Day

The Eighth Day (1967)