Tennessee Williams Quotes
Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.
Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.
It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.
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?
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.
The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.
I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.
Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.
Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.
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.
I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.
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.
Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.
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.
How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven't I done time enough, haven't I served my term? can't I apply for a-pardon?
We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it.
And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle.
There is only one true aristocracy . . . and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
Jim lights a cigarette and leans indolently back on his elbow smiling at Laura with a warmth and charm which lights her inwardly with altar candles.
Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn't love you.
What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? - I wish I knew... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.
Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.
