Tennessee Williams Quotes

We've had this date with each other from the beginning.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other.

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.

The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others.

I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

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

People go to the movies instead of moving.

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.

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

The human heart would never pass the drunk test.... If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn't do it.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

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

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

I believe that the silence of God, the absolute speechlessness of Him is a long, long, and awful thing that the whole world is lost because of.

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

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.

I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by bats.

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

A woman's charm is fifty percent illusion.

But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark -- that sort of make everything else seem -- unimportant.

Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

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

Things have a way of turning out so badly.

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

Just another four-letter word.

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.

Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.

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!

In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.

The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.

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

Oh, you can't describe someone you're in love with!

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

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.

Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair?

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.

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.

Switch clicking off in my head, turning the hot light off and the cool night on and — [He looks up, smiling sadly.] — all of a sudden there's—peace!

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.

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

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.

Since that day, when people have spoken to me of "genius", I have felt the inside pocket to make sure my wallet's still there.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.