Tennessee Williams Quotes

I met her last summer on a moonlight boat trip.

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.

All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.

I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.

Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.

I can find almost anything funny, thank God, so you search for the black, lacy slip that encases the corpse. You know, shift the angle. God may take away, but he often leaves you with a terrific opening line for the next adventure. I would suggest taking it. Move on; change the angle; look at it in a different way tomorrow.

These are the intensities that one cannot live with, that he has to outgrow if he wants to survive. But who can help grieving for them? If the blood vessels could hold them, how much better to keep those early loves with us?

Security is a kind of death.

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you

Make this decision today. Will you be a good and honest writer, or would you rather be famous, loved, noticed? Tell me, because there are different paths for these two divergent goals. The decision to be a true artist is lonelier and slower, but it will lead to better work and, I think, a better life. Very rarely you will be a good and honest writer and also know a little comfort and some attention and the well wishes of a crowd. This is very rare.

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.

If you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anyone else?

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

I'm tired and it's taking an increasing amount out of me, more than I have to give physically. And that's why I want to move to Sicily and buy that little farm and raise a flock of goats and geese. I find it peaceful ... and it would be a nice way to end life.

Luck is believing you're lucky.

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.

Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!

The mountain violets break the rocks.

The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others.

I don't believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life.

For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

Oh, I haven't reached any peak. I hit the bottom in the '60s. When a certain actress undertook the leading role in a recent play of mine, she referred to me as "that old derelict." Not to my face, but behind my back.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

The helpless can't help the helpless.

Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.

I know all about the tyranny of women.

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.

The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die — with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch.

Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man.

I'm not in sympathy with Communism except for populations which are in a state of peasantry, actually hungry and starving. The ideal state for me is some form of Socialism, which doesn't yet exist, as far as I know, which doesn't repress the arts, or any race. Consequently I'm not a political person ... except that I'm a revolutionary.

I don't want realism. I want magic!