Top 300 Tennessee Williams Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Some people say that science clears up all the mysteries for us. In my opinion it only creates more!”

— Tennessee Williams

252. “I have a poet’s weakness for symbols.”

— Tennessee Williams

253. “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. Isn’t that right? Never had any anxiety about it, did it naturally, easily, slowly, with absolute confidence and perfect calm, more like opening a door for a lady or seating her at a table than giving expression to any longing for her. Your indifference made you wonderful at lovemaking – strange? – but true...”

— Tennessee Williams

254. “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

255. “I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.”

— Tennessee Williams

256. “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

257. “If I could just give myself to the steady peace of the rain. That lovely steady peace.”

— Tennessee Williams

258. “Oh, I suppose I am sick, one of those weak and divided people who slip like shadows among you solid strong ones. But sometimes, out of necessity, we shadowy people take on a strength of our own.”

— Tennessee Williams

259. “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

260. “And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths – not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, sometimes it rattles, sometimes they cry out to you, Don’t let me go! Even the old sometimes say, Don’t let me go! As if you were able to stop them! Funerals are quiet with pretty flowers. And oh, what gorgeous boxes they pack them away in!”

— Tennessee Williams

261. “The trouble is that I am being bullied and intimidated by my own success and the fame that surrounds it and what people expect of me and their demands on me. They are forcing me out of my natural position as an artist so that I am in peril of ceasing to be an artist at all. When that happens I will be nothing because I cannot be a professional writer.”

— Tennessee Williams

262. “Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.”

— Tennessee Williams

263. “When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion.”

— Tennessee Williams

264. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

265. “It’s hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don’t want to write.”

— Tennessee Williams

266. “Sometimes we sleep too long in the afternoon and when we wake we find things changed, Signora.”

— Tennessee Williams

267. “Some single men stop drinking when they git married and others start!”

— Tennessee Williams

268. “I talk out the lines as I write them.”

— Tennessee Williams

269. “There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.”

— Tennessee Williams

270. “Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.”

— Tennessee Williams

271. “I never was hard or sell-sufficient enough. When people are soft – soft people have got to shimmer and glow – they’ve got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and put a – paper lantern over the light... It isn’t enough to be soft. You’ve got to be soft and attractive. And I – I’m fading now! I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick.”

— Tennessee Williams

272. “Sometimes a man has got to hock his sweet used-to-be in order to finance his present situation...”

— Tennessee Williams

273. “Of coherency, I usually attempt it.”

— Tennessee Williams

274. “Ignorance of mortality is a comfort.”

— Tennessee Williams

275. “I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.”

— Tennessee Williams

276. “I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It’s hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic.”

— Tennessee Williams

277. “I knew before asking the gypsy that something of this sort would happen to you. You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit and that’s not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated here! It has to be extinguished or used only to light up your nose for Mr. Gutman’s amusement.”

— Tennessee Williams

278. “I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by bats.”

— Tennessee Williams

279. “The carrion birds have tried to peck out my eyes and my tongue and my mind, but they’ve never been able to get at my heart.”

— Tennessee Williams

280. “To be not alone, even for a few moments, is worth the pain and the danger.”

— Tennessee Williams

281. “I’d rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains – than go back mornings! I go! Every time you come in yelling that Goddamn “Rise and Shine!” “Rise and Shine!” I say to myself, “How lucky dead people are!”

— Tennessee Williams

282. “Why didn’t it happen between us? Why did I fail? Why did you come close enough... and not closer?”

— Tennessee Williams

283. “I’ll rise – but I won’t shine.”

— Tennessee Williams

284. “One day will come after another and one night will come after another till sooner or later the summer will be all through with, and then it will be fall, and you will be saying, I don’t see how I’m going to get through the fall.”

— Tennessee Williams

285. “We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

— Tennessee Williams

286. “New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town.”

— Tennessee Williams

287. “But I think people always die alone... with or without relations.”

— Tennessee Williams

288. “Read. Read a lot. Go home. Be quiet. Write. Write some more. It will soon be discovered if you are a writer.”

— Tennessee Williams

289. “Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think... The little there is belongs to people who have experienced some sorrow.”

— Tennessee Williams

290. “Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.”

— Tennessee Williams

291. “Oh, you can’t describe someone you’re in love with! Here is a picture of him!”

— Tennessee Williams

292. “Humanity is just a work in progress.”

— Tennessee Williams

293. “You don’t have the proper amount of faith in yourself.”

— Tennessee Williams

294. “I’m not going to be hypocritical, I’m going to be honestly critical.”

— Tennessee Williams

295. “Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light.”

— Tennessee Williams

296. “Mr. Gonzalez was careful, and for careful people, life has the tendency to take on the character of an almost arid plain, with only here and there, at wide intervals, the solitary palm tree and its shadow and the spring alongside it.”

— Tennessee Williams

297. “That time is short and it doesn’t return again.”

— Tennessee Williams

298. “I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs sill grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last.”

— Tennessee Williams

299. “But, honey, you know as well as I do that a single girl, a girl alone in the world, has got to keep a firm hold on her emotions or she’ll be lost!”

— Tennessee Williams

300. “In some ways I’m no better than the others, in some ways I’m worse because I’m less alive. Maybe it’s being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive makes me sort of accidentally truthful – I don’t know but – anyway – we’ve been friends... – And being friends is telling each other the truth...”

— Tennessee Williams