Quotes About Tennessee Williams

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

Perhaps because my background is theatrical, I have a great affinity with the classics. Hamlet has always been a character of great interest to me and a character I would really love to play. Or a character in a Tennessee Williams play, maybe Tom in 'The Glass Menagerie.'

I came to the plain fields of Ohio with pictures painted by Hollywood movies and the works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. None of them had much to say, if at all, about Dayton, Ohio.

I trained as a classical actor in London for three years. We did Tennessee Williams and dialect and accent classes; they were one of my favorite things to do each week. And we'd strip it down to the phonetics and listen to the sound. It was a really interesting way to look at it all.

To Tennessee Williams we owe a special debt. In a tragic age, he has transformed loneliness by naming it for us, suffered sordidness with beauty, graced poor hurt lives with love and pity.

You hear people say, 'We take our Tennessee Williams very seriously. There is no laughter here.' It's full of humor! Not to laugh is a big, bad mistake!

Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.

I met my wife and, for the next ten years, we did no films at all. She did the first movie and then I did several after. My first movie was written by Tennessee Williams and directed by Kazan and was called Baby Doll.

And, I'd never done Tennessee Williams, and I had done Broadway musicals, so it was a challenge.

I love Tennessee Williams pieces; they are so poetic and I love period pieces.

'Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie.'

Tennessee Williams knew about the South, but he would clean it up and lie about it.

That's why Tennessee Williams was a great writer. Poetically, dramatically, it was fantastic stuff. And with the landscape, the losers in life populating it. His short stories have got rhythm, something musical about them.

Tennessee Williams was so adept at portraying characters who are both fallible and vulnerable. Women were a huge influence in his life, his mother and sister in particular.

When I was a teenager, I continued to visit imaginary places by spending all my free time at our local community theater. Whether I acted in a play or worked backstage, the world of Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare always seemed more real to me than the dreary life of high school.

'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!'

My own journey as a writer has been the discovery of different theatrical voices. Chekhov was a revelation. Tennessee Williams was another one. We read 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and I still remember the cover.

I want to do a Tennessee Williams play.

I love Tennessee Williams; as a playwright, he's so poetic.

When I was on stage in the '50s, it was a glory time, a golden time with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. There was real talent. And now, the theater is a little Disney-fied.

We studied so much Shakespeare in drama school and I'd like to go back to that. I'd really throw myself into something that would probably petrify me. Tennessee Williams. Something juicy.

American naturalism is what my indulgent actor side loves: a bit of Tennessee Williams, a bit of Clifford Odets, August Wilson - I would just love to tackle some of that.

Tennessee Williams is an incredible writer for women because, in many ways, his women characters are him. He writes so passionately.