Tennessee Williams Quotes - Page 9

Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.

Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

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

I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.

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

All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.

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

I know all about the tyranny of women.

Like a cat on a hot tin roof.

I can find almost anything funny, thank God, so you search for the black, lacy slip that encases the corpse. You know, shift the angle. God may take away, but he often leaves you with a terrific opening line for the next adventure. I would suggest taking it. Move on; change the angle; look at it in a different way tomorrow.

Just another four-letter word.

The mountain violets break the rocks.

How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.

Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? A.Indeed I do think that I do. Q.Such as what? A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole.

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people and with violent material. I don't regret having concerned myself with such people, because I think that most of us are disturbed.

I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

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!

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

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.

Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.

Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair?

I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.