Thornton Wilder

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.

Providence has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something high or good. A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

A play visibly represents pure existing.

Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

An incinerator is a writer's best friend.

When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

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

We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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.

In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.

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.'

There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.

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.

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

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.