Welcome to our collection of quotes by Tennessee Williams.
Wikipedia Summary for Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.
At age 33, after years of obscurity, Williams suddenly became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, Williams attempted a new style that did not appeal as widely to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
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!
Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.
Longer Version:
Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. -- Blanche Dubois.
We're all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
You beautiful, stupid young man. That is not pot. It's hashish, Moroccan, and the finest.
We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the big female weapon, and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.
Is that what love is? Using people? And maybe that's what hate is -- not being able to use people.
A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing.
The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel's.
We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.
Hell is yourself, and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.
I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.
Lead them beside still waters because you know how badly they need still waters.
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.
You know what luck is? Luck is believing you're lucky.... To hold front position in this rat-race you've got to believe you are lucky.
Love is a very difficult -- occupation. You got to work at it, man. It ain't a thing every Tom, Dick and Harry has got a true aptitude for.
The decline of the Western world began with the invention of the wheel.
Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!
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.
I think that hate is a thing, a feeling, that can only exist where there is no understanding.
Funerals are pretty compared to death. Funerals are quiet, but deaths not always.
Death commences too early -- almost before you're half acquainted with life -- you meet the other.
It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.
It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.
Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.
Longer Version:
Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think... The little there is belongs to people who have experienced some sorrow.
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.
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.
The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: Hello -- Goodbye! and no address.
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!
The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.
An artist must believe in himself -- Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence -- but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say -- He is vain -- but they are affected.
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.
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.
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defence against betrayal.
You see, baby, after a glass or two of wine I'm inclined to extravagance.
When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
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.
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!
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other.
We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we're doing, if we're selling it, if the listener likes us. Just tell the story and go on to the next one. All of us are full of stories the world might want to hear.
But since I have a poet's weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.
When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.
The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting! -- Which it never can be.
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.
The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.
You know it don't take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?
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!
There is only one true aristocracy ... and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!
I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! -- Don't turn the light on!
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.
Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.
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.
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.
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.
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!
And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.
Longer Version:
And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths--not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, sometimes it rattles, sometimes they cry out to you, Don't let me go! Even the old sometimes say, Don't let me go! As if you were able to stop them! Funerals are quiet with pretty flowers. And oh, what gorgeous boxes they pack them away in!
They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at -- Elysian Fields!
I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. -- Blanche Scene II.
For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.
I've been accused of having a death wish but I think it's life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever.
It's no tragedy, Freckles. Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.
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!
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.
No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.
Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than -- broken down.
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.
