Tennessee Williams Quotes

“Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.”

— Tennessee Williams

I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!

— Tennessee Williams

There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

— Tennessee Williams

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!

— Tennessee Williams

All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.

— Tennessee Williams

The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die
with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. "Poor lady," they'll say, "The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.

— Tennessee Williams

“He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!”

— Tennessee Williams

“We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Why, man alive, Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! All of 'em born and all of em' going to die! Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else's, as far as that goes - gosh! Everybody excels in some one thing. Some in many!”

— Tennessee Williams

The name of a person you love is more than language.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

Stella:
And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby..
[she smiles to herself]
Blanche:
I guess that is what is meant by being in love..

— Tennessee Williams

Young, gifted, and destitute ...

— Tennessee Williams

“A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing”

— Tennessee Williams

“My head don't work any more and it's hard for me to understand how anybody could care if he lived or died or was dying or cared about anything but whether or not there was liquor left in the bottle and so I said what I said without thinking. In some ways I'm no better than the others, in some ways worse because I'm less alive. Maybe it's being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive that makes me sort of accidentally truthful
I don't know but
anyway
we've been friends ... And being friends is telling each other the truth ...”

— Tennessee Williams

“To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”

— Tennessee Williams

“And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle ...”

— Tennessee Williams

“Human beings dream of life everlasting, that's the reason! But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter.”

— Tennessee Williams

Big Daddy: What makes you so restless, have you got ants in your britches?
Brick: Yes, sir ...
Big Daddy: Why?
Brick: - Something - Hasn't - Happened ...
Big Daddy: Yeah? What is that?
Brick [sadly]: - the click ...
Big Daddy: Did you say the click?
Brick: Yes, click.
Big Daddy: What click?
Brick: A click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful
Big Daddy: I sure in hell don't know what you're talking about, but it disturbs me.
Brick: It's just a mechanical thing.
Big Daddy: What is a mechanical thing?
Brick: This click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful. I got to drink till I get it.

— Tennessee Williams

“A man like that is someone to go out with-once-twice-three times when the devil is in you. But live with? Have a child by?”

— Tennessee Williams

“The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.”

— Tennessee Williams

“You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit and that's not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated her! It has to be extinguished ...”

— Tennessee Williams

“True? Yes, I suppose-unfit somehow-anyway ... So I came here. There was nowhere else I could go. I was played out. You know what played out is? My youth was suddenly gone up the water-sprout, and-I met you. You said you needed somebody. Well, I needed some-body, too. I thanked God for you, because you seemed to be gentle-a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in! But I guess I was asking, hoping-too much! Kiefaber, Stanley and Shaw have tied an old tin can to the tail of the kite.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.”

— Tennessee Williams

“In the course of this story, and very soon now, it will be necessary to make some disclosures about Mr. Krupper of a nature too coarse to be dealt with very directly in a work of such brevity. The grossly naturalistic details of a life, contained in the enormously wide context of that life, are softened and qualified by it, but when you attempt to set those details down in a tale, some measure of obscurity or indirection is called for to provide the same, or even approximate, softening effect that existence in time gives to those gross elements in the life itself. When I say that there was a certain mystery in the life of Mr. Krupper, I am beginning to approach those things in the only way possible without a head-on violence that would disgust and destroy and which would actually falsify the story.
("Hard Candy")”

— Tennessee Williams

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

— Tennessee Williams

“It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.”

— Tennessee Williams

“When I was fourteen, my father decided to initiate me into the ways of manhood, and took me to the local whorehouse. The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin' orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!

— Tennessee Williams

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

— Tennessee Williams

Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.

— Tennessee Williams

“When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.”

— Tennessee Williams

“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.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— 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

“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

“Things have a way of turning out so badly.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.”

— 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