A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
– Tennessee Williams
A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.
– Tennessee Williams
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
– Tennessee Williams
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
– Tennessee Williams
Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.
– Tennessee Williams
Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
– Tennessee Williams
Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!
– Tennessee Williams
Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.
– Tennessee Williams
I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
– Tennessee Williams
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.
– Tennessee Williams
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.
– Tennessee Williams
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.
– Tennessee Williams
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
– Tennessee Williams
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
– Tennessee Williams
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.
– Tennessee Williams
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
– Tennessee Williams
Luck is believing you're lucky.
– Tennessee Williams
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.
– Tennessee Williams
Maybe they weren't punks at all, but New York drama critics.
– Tennessee Williams
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other.
– Tennessee Williams
Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.
– Tennessee Williams
Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.
– Tennessee Williams
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.
– Tennessee Williams
Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.
– Tennessee Williams
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.
– Tennessee Williams
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
– Tennessee Williams
Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.
– Tennessee Williams
The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.
– Tennessee Williams
The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!
– Tennessee Williams
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?
– Tennessee Williams
The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
– Tennessee Williams
There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.
– Tennessee Williams
This country of endured but unendurable pain.
– Tennessee Williams
Time is the longest distance between two places.
– Tennessee Williams
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
– Tennessee Williams
To be free is to have achieved your life.
– Tennessee Williams
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.
– Tennessee Williams
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
– Tennessee Williams
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
– Tennessee Williams
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
When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.
– Tennessee Williams
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
– Tennessee Williams
You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.
– Tennessee Williams
You've got many refinements. I don't think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.
– Tennessee Williams
Make voyages! - Attempt them! - there's nothing else...
– Tennessee Williams
Security is a kind of death.
– Tennessee Williams
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.
– Tennessee Williams
Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.
– Tennessee Williams
All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
– Tennessee Williams
All good art is an indiscretion.
– Tennessee Williams
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.