Tennessee Williams

“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 pleasa...”

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

“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 ho...”

“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...”

“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...”

“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...”

“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 constructio...”

“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 th...”

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

“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 th...”

“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...”

“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...”

“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.”