Tennessee Williams Quotes (84 Quotes)

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

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

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

All good art is an indiscretion.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

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

Luck is believing you're lucky.

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

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.

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.

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.

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

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!

To be free is to have achieved your life.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.

Maybe they weren't punks at all, but New York drama critics.

Security is a kind of death.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

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.

You said, ''They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people.'' -- ''What,'' I asked you, ''is harmless about a dreamer, and what,'' I asked you, ''is harmless about the love of the people Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.''

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

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.

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

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other.

A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.

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