Literary Birthday – 17 April – Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder, was born 17 April 1897, and died 7 December 1975.

Quotes

1. It would be a very wonderful thing if we could see more and more works that close that gulf between highbrows and lowbrows.
2. 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.
3. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
4. We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
5. I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
6. There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
7. An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.
8. 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.
9. Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
10. If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.

Thornton Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the two plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel, The Eighth Day.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson

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