Tennessee Williams Quotes

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!

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!

Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.

Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.

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

Guessing isn't knowing.

The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched with sick envy.

I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.

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

-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.

Val: Why do you go out there? Sandra: Because dead people give such good advice. Val: What advice do they give? Sandra: Just one word- live!

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

I talk out the lines as I write them.

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

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

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

I know all about the tyranny of women.

The mountain violets break the rocks.

Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind.

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

When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.

I met her last summer on a moonlight boat trip.

Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.

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

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

Young, gifted, and destitute.

Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?

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.

I must endure & endure & still endure.

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.

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

I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic.

I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.

A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young an' believing.

I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together

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

You take it for granted that I am in something that I want to get out of.

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

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

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.

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.--Blanche Dubois

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

Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?

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