Tennessee Williams Quotes

162 Sourced Quotes

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.

Tennessee Williams
Of course you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you've lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated.

Tennessee Williams
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
Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.

Tennessee Williams
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.

Tennessee Williams
I know this place. … Here it is on the chart. Look, it says here: "Continue until you come to the square of a walled town which is the end of the Camino Real and the beginning of the Camino Real. Halt there," it says, "and turn back, Traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place...

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

Tennessee Williams
We have to distrust each other. It's our only defence against betrayal.

Tennessee Williams
Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! — for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura — and so goodbye…

Tennessee Williams
A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

Tennessee Williams
It haunts me, the passage of time. 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. But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary.

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
Men don't want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

Tennessee Williams
The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.

Tennessee Williams
Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

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

Tennessee Williams
Marriage is an economic arrangement in many ways, let's face it.

Tennessee Williams
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.

Tennessee Williams
They chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is 'Live, live, live, live, live!' It's all they've learned, it's the only advice they can give.

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
A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young an' believing.

Tennessee Williams
Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than--broken down.

Tennessee Williams
I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.

Tennessee Williams
It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.

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

Tennessee Williams
There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

Tennessee Williams
Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.

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.

Tennessee Williams
If you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anyone else?

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