One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among… - Thornton Wilder

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity … The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are."

Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.