Top 280 Tennessee Williams Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched with sick envy.”

— Tennessee Williams

202. “I felt a great depression, probably because I never believed that anything would continue, would hold. I never thought my advance would maintain its ground. I always thought there would be a collapse immediately after the advance.”

— Tennessee Williams

203. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

204. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

214. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

233. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

235. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

244. “Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

246. “Princess, the age of some people can only be calculated by the level of – level of – rot in them.”

— Tennessee Williams

247. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

249. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams