Tennessee Williams Quotes - Page 6

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.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you--gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there?

I believe that the silence of God, the absolute speechlessness of Him is a long, long, and awful thing that the whole world is lost because of.

attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.

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

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

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

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

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.

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

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

I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?

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.

Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!

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

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

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.

People go to the movies instead of moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them.

I don't think there is such a thing as a precise sexual orientation. I think we're all ambiguous sexually.

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

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.

Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.

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.