"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."
"Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water."
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Source: Thornton Wilder, Jackson R. Bryer (1992). “Conversations with Thornton Wilder”, p.79, Univ. Press of Mississippi
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