Quotes from Tennessee Williams

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

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.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

I suppose 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.

Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

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 disguise of illusion.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.

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

Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!

You said, 'They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people.' 'What,' I asked you, 'is harmless about a dreamer, and what,' I asked you, 'is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

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

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

A woman's charm is fifty percent illusion.

I know all about the tyranny of women.

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn't love you.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.

The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.