Tennessee Williams
114 quotes
Biography
Thomas Lanier Williams III, known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.
"All good art is an indiscretion."
"Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching."
"If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels."
"Time is the longest distance between two places."
"I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?"
"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."
"What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains."
"Success and failure are equally disastrous."
"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory."
"Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else."
"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."
"You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it."
"Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going."
"Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead."
"Mendacity is a system that we live in,"declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other."
"When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing."
"When I look back at Stairs to the Roof... I see its faults very plainly, as plainly as you may see them, but still I do not feel apologetic about this play. Unskilled and awkward as I was at this initial period of my playwriting, I certainly had a moral earnestness which I cannot boast of today, and I think that moral earnestness is a good thing for any times, but particularly for these times. I wish I still had the idealistic passion of Benjamin Murphy! You may smile as I do at the sometimes sophomoric aspect of his excitement, but I hope you will respect, as I do, the purity of his feeling and the honest concern which he had in his heart for the basic problem of mankind, which is to dignify our lives with a certain freedom."
"I never saw a more beautiful woman, enormous eyes, skin the color of Devonshire cream."
"Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense."
"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."
"Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence."
"The future is called "perhaps," which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you."
"I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding—not even that—no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all."
"A Prayer for the Wild at Heart That Are Kept in Cages"
"In memory everything seems to happen to music."