Tennessee Williams Quotes

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

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

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather.
Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it?
Byron:Make a departure.
Gutman:From yourself?
Byron:From my present self to myself as I used to be!
Gutman:That's the furthest departure a man could make!

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.

She lives in a world of her own – a world of – little glass ornaments…

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.

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?

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

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

It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.

Time is the longest distance between two places.

Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.

There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

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.

I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it.