“On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity … The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are."”
Writers at Work interview (1958)
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Thornton Wilder 61
American playwright and novelist 1897–1975Related quotes
Writing in Restaurants (1987)
Rolling Stone Issue 903 (22 August 2002)
Context: I think The Razor's Edge is a pretty good movie. But at the time, it was just as reviled as any other comedian doing a serious thing now. Like The Majestic [with Jim Carrey], movies where comedians go straight, people don't like them.
It angers people, like you're taking something away from them. That's the response I got. I thought, "Well, aren't we all bigger than that?" I wasn't shocked by it, but I thought that the professional critics would be able to say, "OK, we shouldn't rule this out, because the guy normally does other stuff."
Unless it's really despicable, then you have to just jump with both feet on the neck.
"The Supreme Court in the Mirror of Justice," University of Pennsylvania Law Review (April, 1957), p. 786.
Other writings
Source: Straight Man (1997), Ch. 2.
“Life and death are balanced as it were on the edge of a razor.”
The Iliad of Homer, Rendered into English Prose (1898), Book X
“Life and death are balanced as it were on the edge of a razor.”
X. 173–174 (tr. Samuel Butler).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
Antrobus, in Act 3
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)
Exploration of Space (1952)
1950s
Context: We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return … The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation … the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.
“But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth.”
"On Truth" in Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), p. 53
1910s
Context: The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin?... They are laughing at Nietzsche yet...