Tennessee Williams Quotes - Page 10

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room encouraged by one in-law to visit another little birdlike women without any nest eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves?

Since that day, when people have spoken to me of "genius", I have felt the inside pocket to make sure my wallet's still there.

My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed.

Young, gifted, and destitute.

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.

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

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

I'm much more conscious of historical events since the '60s. In the '60s, I was insulated by my own addictions, my own lifestyle, from what was going on in the world. After I recovered I was amazed at certain people who had died. I hadn't noticed that they had gone. Not friends ... I'm talking about public figures who had passed away.

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.

It's to a writer's advantage to contain within himself elements of each sex, or any sex. It's to his advantage because it makes him able to write from the female point of view as well as the male. In some cases, of course, you will find some homosexual writers who can only write from a f - - -'s point of view. But I don't regard myself as a f - - -! Some people may. Also audiences wanted escapism. They don't like too much protest or criticism of their way of life.

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

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

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.

Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!

People go to the movies instead of moving.

Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man.

Switch clicking off in my head, turning the hot light off and the cool night on and — [He looks up, smiling sadly.] — all of a sudden there's—peace!

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.

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

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

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?

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.

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

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!