Quotes from Tennessee Williams

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

Why, man alive, Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! All of 'em born and all of em' going to die! Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else's, as far as that goes - gosh! Everybody excels in some one thing. Some in many!

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else.

The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he's dying don't give him pity for others.

Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. 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. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

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

When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.

There is only one true aristocracy . . . and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!

The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand. You're one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here.

For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.

I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

Possess your soul in patience - you will see!

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

Stella: And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby.. [she smiles to herself] Blanche: I guess that is what is meant by being in love..

No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.

You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to... -To lay her cards out on the table.

The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.

How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven't I done time enough, haven't I served my term? can't I apply for a-pardon?

A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing

I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. In the time of your life--live! That 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'm not good. I don't know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody's good.

It's interesting, isn't it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup.

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