Time & Perspective Quote by Gene Wilder

Gene Wilder is doing something sly here: he’s separating the big metaphysical brands (God, devils) from the gritty stuff that actually runs people’s lives. “I never thought of it as God” reads like a gentle rejection of tidy, inherited language. Not militant atheism, more an actor’s impatience with labels that feel too blunt for a private experience. He doesn’t “know what to call it” because the force he’s describing isn’t theological so much as behavioral - impulse, compulsion, ambition, grief, fear.

The pivot is the devil/demon split, and it’s culturally sharp. “Devils” are external villains, cartoon horns and moral bookkeeping. Wilder won’t buy that. “Demons,” though, are internal - a word that keeps the drama while changing the direction of blame. It’s also a classic performer’s framework: you don’t explain away intensity, you personify it. Give it a name and you can talk to it, wrestle it, negotiate with it. That’s how you make an invisible engine legible to an audience.

The subtext is compassionate without being soft. “Everyone…has some kind of a demon” is not a Hallmark reassurance; it’s a democratic indictment. Nobody is pure, nobody is exempt, and the thing that “drives them” may be what makes them brilliant, unbearable, funny, or self-destructive. Coming from Wilder - a man whose comedy often hides panic, loneliness, and manic precision - the line feels less like philosophy and more like an origin story for why humans keep moving even when they don’t fully understand what’s pushing.