Tennessee Williams Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Tennessee Williams's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Playwright Tennessee Williams's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 256 quotes on this page collected since March 26, 1911! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • 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.

  • The helpless can't help the helpless.

    Tennessee Williams (2009). “The Night of the Iguana”, p.52, New Directions Publishing
  • Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!

    Tennessee Williams (1999). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.34, New Directions Publishing
  • Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.

    Tennessee Williams, Margaret Bradham Thornton (2006). “Notebooks”, p.221, Yale University Press
  • I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest.

    Tennessee Williams (2009). “The Night of the Iguana”, p.116, New Directions Publishing
  • 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.

    Tennessee Williams, John S. Bak (2009). “New Selected Essays: Where I Live”, p.85, New Directions Publishing
  • Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

    Tennessee Williams (1971). “The Theatre of Tennessee Williams: The milk train doesn't stop here anymore. Kingdom of Earth (The seven descents of Myrtle). Small craft warnings. The two-character play”, p.86, New Directions Publishing
  • 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.

    Tennessee Williams, Albert J. Devlin (1986). “Conversations with Tennessee Williams”, Univ Pr of Mississippi
  • Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.

    Tennessee Williams, Margaret Bradham Thornton (2006). “Notebooks”, p.15, Yale University Press
  • Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.

  • Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

    Life  
  • 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.

    Tennessee Williams (1994). “Collected Stories”, p.274, New Directions Publishing
  • All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

    Tennessee Williams (1971). “The Theatre of Tennessee Williams: The milk train doesn't stop here anymore. Kingdom of Earth (The seven descents of Myrtle). Small craft warnings. The two-character play”, p.10, New Directions Publishing
  • I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by bats.

  • Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something?

    Tennessee Williams (2013). “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone”, p.10, New Directions Publishing
  • 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.

    Tennessee Williams, John S. Bak (2009). “New Selected Essays: Where I Live”, p.84, New Directions Publishing
  • What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

    Tennessee Williams (1975). “Memoirs”, p.54, New Directions Publishing
  • I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)

    Cat on a Hot Tin Roof act 1 (1955)
  • The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others.

    Tennessee Williams (1991). “The Theatre of Tennessee Williams”, p.88, New Directions Publishing
  • Time doesn't take away from true friendship, nor does separation.

    "Memoirs".
  • To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.

    Tennessee Williams (1993). “The Theatre of Tennessee Williams”, p.88, New Directions Publishing
  • When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

  • Why, man alive, Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! All of 'em born and all of em' going to die! Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else's, as far as that goes - gosh! Everybody excels in some one thing. Some in many!

  • I am more faithful than I intended to be!

    Tennessee Williams (1996). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.76, Heinemann
  • We've had this date with each other from the beginning.

    Tennessee Williams (1995). “A Streetcar Named Desire”, p.131, Heinemann
  • 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.

  • When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

    Tennessee Williams (2008). “Camino Real”, p.8, New Directions Publishing
  • Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

  • 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.

    Tennessee Williams (1945). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.97, New Directions Publishing
  • Luck is believing you're lucky.

    Tennessee Williams (2004). “A Streetcar Named Desire”, p.163, New Directions Publishing
Page 1 of 9
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 256 quotes from the Playwright Tennessee Williams, starting from March 26, 1911! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!