Thornton Niven Wilder (1897–1975) was a prolific American novelist, playwright, and essayist. Over a writing career spanning 50 years, he wrote folksy, optimistic—and subversive—novels and plays that reflect his views of the universal truths in human nature. This three-time Pulitzer winner remains a much-loved and populist literary icon.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Wilder was educated at Yale. After graduating, he studied archaeology and Italian in Rome and served in both wars, becoming a lieutenant colonel in 1944. He started his career as a teacher of English at Lawrenceville Academy 1921–28 and the University of Chicago 1930–37.
Wilder’s celebrated works include The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927; Pulitzer,) The Woman of Andros (1930,) Heaven’s My Destination (1935,) and The Ides of March (1948.) His first plays—The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926,) The Angel That Troubled the Waters (1928,) and The Long Christmas Dinner (1931)—were more literary and less theatrical. He subsequently produced Our Town (1938; Pulitzer,) a successful play that conjures without scenery or costumes a universal of provincial life, and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942; Pulitzer,) an amusing and philosophical fable of humanity’s struggle to survive.
Wilder’s later plays include The Matchmaker (1954,) A Life in the Sun (1955,) The Eighth Day (1967,) Theophilus North (1974) and, the musical Hello Dolly! (1964;) the latter was based on The Matchmaker.
Wilder also wrote modern adaptations of André Obey’s play Lucrèce (1932) and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1937.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Thornton Wilder
It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Conflict
The greatest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
—Thornton Wilder
Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
—Thornton Wilder
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Love
Comparisons of one’s lot with others’ teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Opportunities, Reality, Comparisons
We live in what is, but we find 1,000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Theater
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
Topics: Children
I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: The Military
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
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
A play visibly represents pure existing.
—Thornton Wilder
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
Topics: Comedy
Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Theater
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Meaning, Discovery, Romance, Love
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
Topics: Childhood, Unhappiness, Children, Youth
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.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Time
I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Attitude, Acceptance
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Mankind, Man
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Morning
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Gratitude
Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It’s your combination sinners—your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards—who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Humor, Vice
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
Topics: Adventure
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Theater
I’ve never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. 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—whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Goodness
Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Speech, Conversation
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Pride
I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Poetry
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate—that’s my philosophy.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Philosophy, Enjoyment, Advice, Gratitude
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Books, Literature
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Hope
The best part of married life is the fights. The rests is merely so.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Marriage
Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Reading
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Generosity
That’s the advantage of having lived 65 years. You don’t feel the need to be impatient any longer.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Patience, Resilience
Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Money
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.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Acting, Theater, Actors
Everybody’s talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Perspective
A sense of humor judges one’s actions and the actions of others from a wider reference … it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.
—Thornton Wilder
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Choice, Choices, Decision
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
Topics: Theater
The best thing about animals is that they don’t talk much.
—Thornton Wilder
Topics: Animals
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