Tennessee Williams Thinking Quotations

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?

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.

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

-You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to... -To lay her cards out on the table.

I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest.

People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.

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

I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.

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.

I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.

Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.

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!

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.

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

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

I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.