Tennessee Williams Quotations | Page 2

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? A.Indeed I do think that I do. Q.Such as what? A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole.

I know all about the tyranny of women.

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

Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other.

I met her last summer on a moonlight boat trip...

It's interesting, isn't it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup.

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!

In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

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..

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families

You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!

But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark -- that sort of make everything else seem -- unimportant.

I don't ask for your pity, but just your understanding - no, not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

Young, gifted, and destitute...

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

But since I have a poet's weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.

Things have a way of turning out so badly.

Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.

It is a terrible thing for an old woman to outlive her dogs.

Nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof...

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.

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

We're left alone with each other. We have to creep close to each other and give gentle little nudges with our paws and our muzzles before we can slip into sleep and rest for the next day's playtime.

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

Nobody knew my rose of the world but me... I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.

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.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

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

I don't believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.

Make this decision today. Will you be a good and honest writer, or would you rather be famous, loved, noticed? Tell me, because there are different paths for these two divergent goals. The decision to be a true artist is lonelier and slower, but it will lead to better work and, I think, a better life. Very rarely you will be a good and honest writer and also know a little comfort and some attention and the well wishes of a crowd. This is very rare.

Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down... So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function!

Guessing isn't knowing.

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

I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.

Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than--broken down.

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.

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

Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

Kenneth Hari does not paint portraits as they are but as he is. I feel he is hiding something from me. To board a train into his mind would give me a ride into dark adventure.

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.

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

Luck is believing you're lucky.

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.

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.

Mexico is the front door to South America - and the back door to the states...

The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.

If you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anyone else?

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.

I can find almost anything funny, thank God, so you search for the black, lacy slip that encases the corpse. You know, shift the angle. God may take away, but he often leaves you with a terrific opening line for the next adventure. I would suggest taking it. Move on; change the angle; look at it in a different way tomorrow.

We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!

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.

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.

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

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

Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.

I talk out the lines as I write them.

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light....

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?

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!

Just another four-letter word.

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.

The mountain violets break the rocks.

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.

A woman's charm is fifty percent illusion.

We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?

Marriage is an economic arrangement in many ways, let's face it.

There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts...

I must endure & endure & still endure.

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.

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

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...

No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.

It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn't love you.

There is only one true aristocracy . . . and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!

I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)

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.

In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.

I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II

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!

Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.

I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest.

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.

-You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to... -To lay her cards out on the table.

We've had this date with each other from the beginning.

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.

Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.

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.