Tennessee Williams

“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”

“We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”

“All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.”

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

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

“I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”

“If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.”

“I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won’t have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk...”

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”

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

“All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.”

“Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.”

“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.”

“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!”

“The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you?”

“Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other.”

“For time is the longest distance between two places.”

“Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.”

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

“The future is called 'perhaps', which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

“Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.”

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”

“Luck is believing you're lucky.”

“If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.”

“All good art is an indiscretion.”

“Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.”

“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.”

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

“The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!--Which it never can be....”

“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...”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.”

“Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.”

“In memory, everything seems to happen to music.”

“A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.”

“I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.”

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

“High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”

“Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it.... Success is shy-it won't come out while you're watching.”

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”

“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.”

“When I stop [working], the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm working.”

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corres...”

“You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.”

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will...”

“I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place...”

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

“I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do--then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its...”

“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.”

“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 Br...”

“A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”

“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.”

“Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.”

“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.”

“We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.”

“Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.”

“I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.”

“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”