Tennessee Williams Quotes

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

Kenneth Hari does not paint portraits as they are but as he is. I feel he is hiding something from me. To board a train into his mind would give me a ride into dark adventure.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

What shouldn't you do if you're a young playwright? Don't bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it'll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.

I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.

attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.

Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? A.Indeed I do think that I do. Q.Such as what? A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole.

Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families

No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.

Jim lights a cigarette and leans indolently back on his elbow smiling at Laura with a warmth and charm which lights her inwardly with altar candles.

If people behaved in the same way nations do they would all be put in straitjackets.

My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn't love you.

I must endure & endure & still endure.

You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it.

There is only one true aristocracy . . . and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!

Of course you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you've lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated.

Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.

I am more faithful than I intended to be!

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together

I don't ask for your pity, but just your understanding - no, not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

Just another four-letter word.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you--gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there?

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.

And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done, I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into...

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

I don't think there is such a thing as a precise sexual orientation. I think we're all ambiguous sexually.

Like a cat on a hot tin roof.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!