Tennessee Williams Quotes - Page 8

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.

Make this decision today. Will you be a good and honest writer, or would you rather be famous, loved, noticed? Tell me, because there are different paths for these two divergent goals. The decision to be a true artist is lonelier and slower, but it will lead to better work and, I think, a better life. Very rarely you will be a good and honest writer and also know a little comfort and some attention and the well wishes of a crowd. This is very rare.

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die — with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch.

I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II

Things have a way of turning out so badly.

Oh, I haven't reached any peak. I hit the bottom in the '60s. When a certain actress undertook the leading role in a recent play of mine, she referred to me as "that old derelict." Not to my face, but behind my back.

Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!

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.

I'm tired and it's taking an increasing amount out of me, more than I have to give physically. And that's why I want to move to Sicily and buy that little farm and raise a flock of goats and geese. I find it peaceful ... and it would be a nice way to end life.

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

The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.

They chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is 'Live, live, live, live, live!' It's all they've learned, it's the only advice they can give.

I must endure & endure & still endure.

Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?

The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.

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

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'm not in sympathy with Communism except for populations which are in a state of peasantry, actually hungry and starving. The ideal state for me is some form of Socialism, which doesn't yet exist, as far as I know, which doesn't repress the arts, or any race. Consequently I'm not a political person ... except that I'm a revolutionary.

Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.

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

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