Top 280 Tennessee Williams Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I don’t think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.”

— Tennessee Williams

202. “Mexico is the front door to South America – and the back door to the states...”

— Tennessee Williams

203. “I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.”

— Tennessee Williams

204. “It’s no tragedy, Freckles. Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.”

— Tennessee Williams

205. “Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light...”

— Tennessee Williams

206. “It is a terrible thing for an old woman to outlive her dogs.”

— Tennessee Williams

207. “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning.”

— Tennessee Williams

208. “Since that day, when people have spoken to me of “genius”, I have felt the inside pocket to make sure my wallet’s still there.”

— Tennessee Williams

209. “I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.”

— Tennessee Williams

210. “We mustn’t scream at each other, the walls in this house have ears...”

— Tennessee Williams

211. “Why, you’re not crippled, you just have a little defect – hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it – develop charm – and vivacity – and – charm!”

— Tennessee Williams

212. “You see, baby, after a glass or two of wine I’m inclined to extravagance.”

— Tennessee Williams

213. “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!”

— Tennessee Williams

214. “Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.”

— Tennessee Williams

215. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

216. “You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you “have a name” is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own volition – and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!”

— Tennessee Williams

217. “Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then... you die, or find something else.”

— Tennessee Williams

218. “If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don’t regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.”

— Tennessee Williams

219. “Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.”

— Tennessee Williams

220. “A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you.”

— Tennessee Williams

221. “Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers.”

— Tennessee Williams

222. “Kenneth Hari does not paint portraits as they are but as he is. I feel he is hiding something from me. To board a train into his mind would give me a ride into dark adventure.”

— Tennessee Williams

223. “You were a wonderful lover... Such a wonderful person to go to bed with, and I think mostly because you were really indifferent to it.”

— Tennessee Williams

224. “When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.”

— Tennessee Williams

225. “I’ve been accused of having a death wish but I think it’s life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever.”

— Tennessee Williams

226. “Life is such a mysteriously complicated thing that no one should really presume to judge and condemn the behavior of anyone else.”

— Tennessee Williams

227. “To you, whoever you are, when I am gone – remember to be kind tonight to some lonely person. For me.”

— Tennessee Williams

228. “The girl who said ‘no’ – she doesn’t exist anymore, she died last summer – suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her.”

— Tennessee Williams

229. “An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected.”

— Tennessee Williams

230. “Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.”

— Tennessee Williams

231. “One man has one great true thing in his life. One great good thing that is true!”

— Tennessee Williams

232. “Life that winter in Rome: a golden dream, and I don’t mean Rafaello and the mimosa and the total freedom of life. Stop there: What I do mean is the total freedom of life and Rafaello and the mimosa and the letto matrimoniale and the Frascati when morning work was over.”

— Tennessee Williams

233. “I cannot imagine any witch of a woman casting a spell over you.”

— Tennessee Williams

234. “I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable.”

— Tennessee Williams

235. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

236. “The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting! – Which it never can be...”

— Tennessee Williams

237. “It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.”

— Tennessee Williams

238. “Young, gifted, and destitute...”

— Tennessee Williams

239. “Chance, you’ve gone past something you couldn’t afford to go past; your time, your youth, you’ve passed it. It’s all you had and you’ve had it.”

— Tennessee Williams

240. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

241. “I know! WHY! – Am I so catty? – Cause I’m consumed with envy an’ eaten up with longing? –.”

— Tennessee Williams

242. “I have met a great many people, nearly all friendly, many of whom I was fairly intimate with in one way of another, but nobody has seemed as close to me in spirit as you are. That was why I thought only of you at those times when my life seemed in danger of falling to pieces.”

— Tennessee Williams

243. “Everyone says he’s sincere, but everyone isn’t sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he’s sincere there wouldn’t be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!”

— Tennessee Williams

244. “There’s no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine.”

— Tennessee Williams

245. “We’re left alone with each other. We have to creep close to each other and give gentle little nudges with our paws and our muzzles before we can slip into sleep and rest for the next day’s playtime.”

— Tennessee Williams

246. “Some people say that science clears up all the mysteries for us. In my opinion it only creates more!”

— Tennessee Williams

247. “When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

249. “But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary.”

— Tennessee Williams

250. “A beautiful trust. A rare and beautiful trust. It makes me cry a little. That’s all that life has to give in the way of perfection. The warm and complete understanding of two in a close-walled room with the windows blind to the world.”

— Tennessee Williams