Tennessee Williams quotes:

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

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.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you

Time is the longest distance between two places.

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.

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.

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you--gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there?

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

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

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

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

Oh, I haven't reached any peak. I hit the bottom in the '60s. When a certain actress undertook the leading role in a recent play of mine, she referred to me as "that old derelict." Not to my face, but behind my back.

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses."

And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle...

I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

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..

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.

Like a Cat on a hot tin roof

Nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof...

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

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.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.

All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down... So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function!

All good art is an indiscretion.

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

Luck is believing you're lucky.

Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

I'm much more conscious of historical events since the '60s. In the '60s, I was insulated by my own addictions, my own lifestyle, from what was going on in the world. After I recovered I was amazed at certain people who had died. I hadn't noticed that they had gone. Not friends ... I'm talking about public figures who had passed away.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!

In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.

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.

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . .

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

There's no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine.

Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.

Men don't want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.

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.

Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.

America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.

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

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

When I was fourteen, my father decided to initiate me into the ways of manhood, and took me to the local whorehouse. The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin' orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.

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

I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.

I don't want realism. I want magic!

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.

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

His beauty was notable even in a province where the lack of it is more exceptional in a young man.

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you?

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.

You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.

In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.

Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

This play is dedicated to the memory of Clarence Darrow, The Great Defender, whose mental frontiers were the four corners of the sky.

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!

He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity.

You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit and that's not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated her! It has to be extinguished...

Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.

Security is a kind of death.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

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.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

The future is called 'perhaps', which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark -- that sort of make everything else seem -- unimportant.

He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

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

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other.

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

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

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

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

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

A woman's charm is fifty percent illusion.