Tennessee Williams Quotations

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!

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

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.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

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

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.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you?

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

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

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

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

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

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

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

Time is the longest distance between two places.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

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?

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.

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

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.

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other.

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

The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

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

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

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

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

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

Maybe they weren't punks at all, but New York drama critics.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

You said, ''They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people.'' -- ''What,'' I asked you, ''is harmless about a dreamer, and what,'' I asked you, ''is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.''

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!

You've got many refinements. I don't think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.

Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.

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

Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.

Everybody is nothing until you love them.

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

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.

Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it?

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

How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven't I done time enough, haven't I served my term? can't I apply for a-pardon?

And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle...

I don't want realism. I want magic!

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

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.

An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected.

I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.

It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.

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

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

You see, baby, after a glass or two of wine I’m inclined to extravagance.

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. "Poor lady," they'll say, "The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.

The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.

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?

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.

I don't believe in "original sin." I don't believe in "guilt." I don't believe in villains or heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents. This is so simple I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm sure it's true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that's why I don't understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.

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 cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

You said, 'They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.' 'What,' I asked you, 'is harmless about a dreamer, and what,' I asked you, 'is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.

You know, then that the public Somebody you are when you 'have a name' is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath

Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!

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.

Security is a kind of death.

The name of a person you love is more than language.

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?—I wish I knew... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can...

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.

All good art is an indiscretion.

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

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

I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.

attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

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

America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.

He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.