Thornton Wilder (b. April 17): “An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.”

17 Apr

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

Quotes on writing:

  1. An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.
  2. Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
  3. If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.
  4. It would be a very wonderful thing if we could see more and more works that close that gulf between highbrows and lowbrows.
  5. There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.

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