Tennessee Williams Quotes

Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think. ~ Tennessee Williams

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

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

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

Tennessee Williams once wrote, '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.' Yes, but oh! What a view from that upstairs window! What Tennessee failed to mention was that if we look out of that window with an itchy curiousity and a passionate eye; with a generous spirit and a capacity for delight; and yes, the language with which to support and enrich the thing we see, then it DOESN'T MATTER that the house is burning down around us. It doesn't matter. Let the motherfucker blaze! ~ Tom Robbins

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! ~ Tennessee Williams

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty. ~ Tennessee Williams

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

And in the spring, it's touching to notice them making their first discovery of love! As if nobody had ever known it before! ~ Tennessee Williams

We're left alone with each other. We have to creep close to each other and give gentle little nudges with our paws and our muzzles before we can slip into sleep and rest for the next day's playtime. ~ Tennessee Williams

I do a lot of American plays. I've done a lot of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon. I was in 'Sisters Rosensweig,' 'Six Degrees of Separation,' all of that stuff. So we're very familiar with America. I did 400 performances of 'Born Yesterday.' I did 700 performances of 'They're Playing Our Song.' ~ Jacki Weaver

I want to rest. I want to breathe quietly again. ~ Tennessee Williams

He always entered the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside ~ Tennessee Williams

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 will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block. ~ Tennessee Williams

One man has one great true thing in his life. One great good thing that is true! ~ Tennessee Williams

...most writers, and most other artists, too, are primarily motivated in their desperate vocation by a desire to find and to separate truth from the complex of lies and evasions they live in, and I think that this impulse is what makes their work not so much a profession as a vocation, a true calling. ~ Tennessee Williams

Let's go down and swim in that liquid moonlight. ~ Tennessee Williams

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

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going! ~ Tennessee Williams

He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distance. ~ Tennessee Williams

-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. ~ Tennessee Williams

A Prayer for The Wild at Heart

A prayer for the wild at heart
Kept in cages
I know how you long
To run wild and free
To feel your blood pumping
To hear your heart beating faster
Yet you can't
For you are locked inside a prison
One that you will never escape
I can hear your howls of pain
And your growls of frustration
Pacing back and forth
Clawing at the bars
Tearing at your skin
Begging to be set free
Your eyes are wild of full hate
You face bears no smile
Only a snarl of anger

Blood drips from your hands
Blood from the people
Who didn't understand
Your fearful whimpers fill the air
As you look to the full moon
And let out a mournful howl
Your voice gets louder
As I and the others join in
We let our pleads fill the night
As we sit in our cold cages
Praying someone will hear

- Tennessee Williams ~ Tennessee Williams

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

When I had that attack of pleurosis - he asked me what was the matter when I came back. I said pleurosis - he thought that I said Blue Roses! So that's what he always called me after that. Whenever he saw me, he'd holler, Hello, Blue Roses! ~ Tennessee Williams

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur. ~ Tennessee Williams

There's no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine. ~ Tennessee Williams

Everybody is nothing until you love them. ~ Tennessee Williams

When I was a teenager, I continued to visit imaginary places by spending all my free time at our local community theater. Whether I acted in a play or worked backstage, the world of Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare always seemed more real to me than the dreary life of high school. ~ Mary Pope Osborne

Brick's detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse. The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to "keep face" in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the "mendacity" that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important. The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent - fiercely charged! - interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. 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. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from "pat" conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience. ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table.
GRACE: -Is that an order?
CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests.
GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down] ~ Tennessee Williams

Stella:
And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby..
[she smiles to herself]
Blanche:
I guess that is what is meant by being in love.. ~ Tennessee Williams

It is a terrible thing for an old woman to outlive her dogs. ~ Tennessee Williams

For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even) critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken. What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and, then, a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty. ~ Daniel Mendelsohn

I have a poet's weakness for symbols. ~ Tennessee Williams

Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag. ~ Tennessee Williams

I'm not really so hard & cynical after all - in fact I'm still dangerously soft. ~ Tennessee Williams

Why, you're not crippled, you just have a little defect - hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it - develop charm - and vivacity - and - charm! ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it. ~ Tennessee Williams

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

I am running away but I prefer to call it a strategic retreat. ~ Tennessee Williams

I'd never blame anyone else who falls for the same brand of seduction. I embrace that we're all similarly flawed. That makes the self-inflicted wounds hurt less. I'd read Tennessee Williams. I just didn't expect to be living my own tainted little version of Suddenly Last Summer. ~ Dan Skinner

I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room encouraged by one in-law to visit another little birdlike women without any nest eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves? ~ Tennessee Williams

There are no "good" or "bad" people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. ~ Tennessee Williams

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

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

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. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected. ~ Tennessee Williams

Val: Why do you go out there?
Sandra: Because dead people give such good advice.
Val: What advice do they give?
Sandra: Just one word- live! ~ Tennessee Williams

For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura
and so goodbye ... ~ Tennessee Williams

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! ~ Tennessee Williams

...the human animal is a selfish beast... ~ Tennessee Williams

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

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

I love Tennessee Williams pieces; they are so poetic and I love period pieces. ~ Richard Hatch

You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it. ~ Tennessee Williams

Watching the news inspires me to keep going and reminds me why I should never complain. I'm inspired by those who don't let others define them: Martin Luther King Jr., James Dean, Vincent Van Gogh, Hillary Clinton, Tennessee Williams, director Steve McQueen. They've all changed the conversation by making their voices heard. ~ Robert Piper

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

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

Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down ... So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function! ~ Tennessee Williams

I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won't have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I'll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I'll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain. ~ Tennessee Williams

Nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof ... ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

This was a respect in which he paid due homage to the wise old spirit of the late Emiel Kroger, that romantically practical Teuton who used to murmur to Pablo, between sleeping and waking, a sort of incantation that went like his: Sometimes you will find it and other times you won't find it and the times you don't find it are the times when you have got to be careful. Those are the times when you have got to remember that other times you will find it, not this time but the next time, or the time after that, and then you've got to be able to go home without it, yes, those times are the times when you have got to be able to go home without it, go home alone without it ... ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

People go to the movies instead of moving. ~ Tennessee Williams

How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.

A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then

An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth's obscene, corrupting love.

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me? ~ Tennessee Williams

Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs! ~ Tennessee Williams

My places were emotional, primarily. I wrote of locales in which I had lived, or in which I imagined I could live, but the topography was primal and sexual and terminal. It bore no distinct architecture or design or dialect. It was merely human and in peril, which is to say universal. But on Royal and Coliseum and Vista--streets I cannot relinquish--I found my places and I dreamed a narrative. Can I go there and find it again?"--Tennessee Williams ~ James Grissom

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors. ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. […] He sizes women up with a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images flashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them. ~ Tennessee Williams

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

Monsters don't die early; they hang on long. Awfully long. Their vanity's infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves. ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and laxities that Success is heir to
why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where the danger lies. ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

The carrion birds have tried to peck out my eyes and my tongue and my mind, but they've never been able to get at my heart. ~ Tennessee Williams

She lives in a world of her own – a world of – little glass ornaments… ~ Tennessee Williams

Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive. ~ Tennessee Williams

To be free is to have achieved your life. ~ Tennessee Williams

I've redone plays of mine and made changes. A play is a living thing, and I'd never say I wouldn't rewrite years later. Tennessee Williams did that all the time, and it's distressing, because I'd like the play to be out there in its finished form. ~ Horton Foote

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches. ~ Lorrie Moore

I am more faithful than I intended to be! ~ Tennessee Williams

Life is important. There is nothing to hold onto. A man that drinks is throwing his life away. Don't do it, hold on to your life. There is nothing else to hold on to ... ~ Tennessee Williams

'The Glass Menagerie' by Tennessee Williams is a great play. I had to read it for school when I was younger, but I started writing scripts after that. That's what got me into writing. ~ Jake T. Austin

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

Nature is not on the side of a girl over thirty ~ Tennessee Williams

Big Daddy: Ignorance - of morality - is a comfort. ~ Tennessee Williams

A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you. ~ Tennessee Williams

[Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.] ~ Tennessee Williams

When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking. ~ Tennessee Williams

Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level. ~ Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams knew about the South, but he would clean it up and lie about it. ~ Paul Mooney

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour. ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Tennessee Williams

Success and failure are equally disastrous. ~ Tennessee Williams