Quotes from Tennessee Williams

He is gallantly smiling, ineluctably smiling, as if to say I will be smiling forever.

Time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

I don't know what the beach of Laguna is like now but in the thirties it was a fine place to pass summer days. There was constant volleyball, there was surfing and surfers, there was an artist colony and there was so on and so forth and all of it was delightful. It seems to me that the best part of all was riding our bikes up the canyon at first dark in those days when the sky was still a poem. And

We have to do all that we can to build ourselves up. In these trying times we live in, all that we have to cling to is - each other

If you stick around long enough you're either forgotten or remembered too much.

And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of hue, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice. "The Broken Tower" by Hart Crane

Oh, God, can't we stop now? Finally? Please let us. It's so quiet here, now.

All of these lived and died upon the earth and nothing was done about it.

Well, you better look out. They got a new bureau in the guvamint files. It's called U.W. Stands for Useless Wimmen. Tha's secret plans on foot t' have 'em shot! (He laughs at his joke.)

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.

Nobody knew my rose of the world but me... I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart

You take it for granted that I am in something that I want to get out of.

In memory, everything seems to happen to music.

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

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.

Security is a kind of death.

Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

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

You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it.

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

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

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