Quotes by Tennessee Williams

“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?”

“Laws of silence dont work. When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence dont work, its just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forg...”

“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 disg...”

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

“The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I wil...”

“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.”

“My places were emotional, primarily. I wrote of locales in which I had lived, or in which I imagined I could live, but the topography was primal and sexual and terminal. It bore no distinct archite...”

“#NAME?”

“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 wrot...”

“You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit and that's not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated her! It has to be extinguished...”

“You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarr...”

“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 lif...”

“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...”

“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 le...”

“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 block...”

“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 depart...”