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
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.
There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
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.
Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.
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.
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.'
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.
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
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.
I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.
But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.
When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
A play visibly represents pure existing.
In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
An incinerator is a writer's best friend.
If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.
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.
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.
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
