Quotes from Tennessee Williams

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

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?

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

But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark -- that sort of make everything else seem -- unimportant.

Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

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

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

Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.

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

All good art is an indiscretion.

Val: Why do you go out there? Sandra: Because dead people give such good advice. Val: What advice do they give? Sandra: Just one word- live!

Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: "Hello - Goodbye!" and no address.

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

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.

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

I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.

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

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

I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life.

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

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.