Tennessee Williams Quotes

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.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

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.

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

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

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

I don't want realism. I want magic!

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

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. 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.

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

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

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

Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

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

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

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't ask for your pity, but just your understanding - no, not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

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."

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.

Security is a kind of death.

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

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

To be free is to have achieved your life.

Luck is believing you're lucky.

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

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

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

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

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.

Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something?

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.

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?

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