Tennessee Williams Quotes

Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it?

— Tennessee Williams

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

“Luck is believing you're lucky.”

— Tennessee Williams

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?

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.

— Tennessee Williams

“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.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— 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. I will try. 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. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!”

— 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

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

— Tennessee Williams

“The future is called "perhaps", which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

— Tennessee Williams

My only point, the only point that I'm making, is life has got to be allowed to continue even after the dream of life is
all
over ...

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

“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!”

— Tennessee Williams

“For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

“Jim lights a cigarette and leans indolently back on his elbow smiling at Laura with a warmth and charm which lights her inwardly with altar candles.”

— Tennessee Williams

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 ...

— Tennessee Williams

“One does not escape that easily from the seduction of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will now continue my life as it was before this thing, Success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to - why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position to know where danger lies.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers.”

— Tennessee Williams

“It would be one of those evenings when lady luck showed the bitchy streak in her nature”

— Tennessee Williams

“Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather.
Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it?
Byron:Make a departure.
Gutman:From yourself?
Byron:From my present self to myself as I used to be!
Gutman:That's the furthest departure a man could make!”

— 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

“Nothing human disgusts me unless its unkind”

— Tennessee Williams

Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then ... you die, or find something else.

— Tennessee Williams

“I can't guarantee that a lobotomy would stop her-babbling!!”

— Tennessee Williams

“The role of benefactor is worse than thankless, it's the role of a victim, Doctor, a sacrificial victim, yes, they want your blood, Doctor, they want your blood on the altar steps of their outraged, outrageous egos!”

— Tennessee Williams

You two had something that had to be kept on ice, yes, incorruptible, yes!
and death was the only icebox where you could keep it ...

— Tennessee Williams

“That Europe is nothin' on earth but a great big auction, that's all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it's just a big fire-sale, the whole rutten thing.”

— Tennessee Williams

“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.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Of coherency, I usually attempt it.”

— Tennessee Williams

You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarrassing people in the world for they continually remind you of inequities which we accept as the proper thing. The sight of an ancient woman, gasping and wheezing as she drags a heavy pail of water down a hotel corridor to mop up the mess of some drunken overprivileged guest, is one that sickens and weighs upon the heart and withers it with shame for this world in which it is not only tolerated but regarded as proof positive that the wheels of Democracy are functioning as they should without interference from above or below. Nobody should have to clean up anybody else's mess in this world. It is terribly bad for both parties, but probably worse for the one receiving the service.

— Tennessee Williams

“I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life.”

— Tennessee Williams

“To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

“I am more faithful than I intended to be!”

— Tennessee Williams

“Not facing a fire doesn't put it out.”

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

“There's no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine.”

— Tennessee Williams

“I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.”

— Tennessee Williams

“It's to a writer's advantage to contain within himself elements of each sex, or any sex. It's to his advantage because it makes him able to write from the female point of view as well as the male. In some cases, of course, you will find some homosexual writers who can only write from a f - - -'s point of view. But I don't regard myself as a f - - -! Some people may. Also audiences wanted escapism. They don't like too much protest or criticism of their way of life.”

— Tennessee Williams

“My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed.”

— Tennessee Williams

I'm tired and it's taking an increasing amount out of me, more than I have to give physically. And that's why I want to move to Sicily and buy that little farm and raise a flock of goats and geese. I find it peaceful ... and it would be a nice way to end life.

— Tennessee Williams