Tennessee Williams Quotes

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

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

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

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

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.

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

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

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

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

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

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

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

Everybody is nothing until you love them.

Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

I don't want realism. I want magic!

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

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

For time is the longest distance between two places.

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

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

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

America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.

Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.

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

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

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

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

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

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

It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

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

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

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!

I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life.

To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.

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

An artist must believe in himself - Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence - but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say - He is vain - but they are affected.

Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.

Men don't want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

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.

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

Luck is believing you're lucky.