Tennessee Williams Quotes

162 Sourced Quotes

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

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
Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

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

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. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts...

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

Tennessee Williams