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At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Camino Real
There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity...You can smell it. It smells like death.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Funerals are pretty compared to death. Funerals are quiet, but deaths not always.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
I don’t want realism. I want magic!
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Glass Menagerie
I think that hate is a thing, a feeling, that can only exist where there is no understanding.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
Silence about a thing just magnifies it.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
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, The Paris Review, fall 1981
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defence against betrayal.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Camino Real
Guilt is universal.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others, no sir.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Night of the Iguana
We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel's.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Afterword to Camino Real
There is a time for departure, even when there is no certain place to go.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Camino Real
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Night of the Iguana
Time is the longest distance between two places.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Glass Menagerie
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
A woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Glass Menagerie
Death commences too early--almost before you're half acquainted with life--you meet the other.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Orpheus Descending
Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Night of the Iguana
All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Glass Menagerie
You know what luck is? Luck is believing you're lucky.... To hold front position in this rat-race you've got to believe you are lucky.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Suddenly Last Summer
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Camino Real
You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Glass Menagerie
I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Paris Review, fall 1981
Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Night of the Iguana
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, attributed, Profiles
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