Top 100 Quotes About Tennessee Williams
#1. The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
Northrop Frye
#2. Look at Picasso. O'Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.
Marisha Pessl
#3. Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.
Edmund White
#4. Savannah is a ... lovely pastel dream of tight cobbled streets ... There are legendary scenes ... to rival any dreamed up by Tennessee Williams.
Rosemary Daniell
#5. Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.
Gloria Swanson
#6. 'The Glass Menagerie' by Tennessee Williams is a great play. I had to read it for school when I was younger, but I started writing scripts after that. That's what got me into writing.
Jake T. Austin
#7. If I had my choice in life I would have had the gifts of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. Unfortunately my gifts lie in comedy and so comedy comes fairly easy to me and I occasionally have an idea for a very serious piece and I do it, but the ideas don't come that readily to me.
Woody Allen
#8. I have a bit of an obsession with the 1950's and all those actors from Montgomery Clift to James Dean and Anthony Perkins. Just that whole era of Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan.
Sebastian Stan
#9. I love Tennessee Williams pieces; they are so poetic and I love period pieces.
Richard Hatch
#10. Tennessee Williams is an incredible writer for women because, in many ways, his women characters are him. He writes so passionately.
Laila Robins
#11. New Orleans could wreck your liver and poison your blood. It could destroy you financially. It could shun you or embrace you, teach you tricks of the heart you thought Tennessee Williams was just kidding about. And in August it could break your spirit.
Julie Smith
#12. I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan
#13. '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.'
John Lahr
#14. All of us are seeking a home, and I don't mean where we were born, or where we now live and have things, but where we can do the big things, the right things. Where we belong, where we fit, where we're loved."--Tennessee Williams, "Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog
James Grissom
#15. Tennessee Williams, one of my favorite playwrights, [lived] down there. You always heard about the Keys and how amazing they are and, well, it's like a highway with some bars on it.
John Leguizamo
#16. Memory, of course, is unreliable, often evil, but it is the source of our identity."--Tennessee Williams
James Grissom
#17. Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennessee Williams had for Memoirs. There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, "My tits are on fire").
Christopher Bram
#18. 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.
Eli Wallach
#19. Tennessee Williams knew about the South, but he would clean it up and lie about it.
Paul Mooney
#20. Being a theater actor, I've done a lot of plays where I've seen someone else play the same role in another production. Especially with the classics: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams.
Jacki Weaver
#21. When I was young, I wanted to be a dramatic writer, a writer of tragedy. Nothing would've pleased me more than if I could have written like Eugene O'Neil or Tennessee Williams.
Woody Allen
#22. 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.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#23. There's no American playwright after 1945 who wasn't profoundly affected - who didn't have their DNA changed by Tennessee Williams.
John Guare
#24. I'm very fond of Tennessee Williams' plays, and when my husband and I went to New Orleans in the late 1970s, we saw 'A Street Car Named Desire.'
Ruth Rendell
#25. 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.
Mary Pope Osborne
#26. I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.
Kiran Desai
#27. When homosexuals were repressed, you got Tennessee Williams. Today's tolerance got you Hilton Perez.
Lenny Bruce
#28. I'd never blame anyone else who falls for the same brand of seduction. I embrace that we're all similarly flawed. That makes the self-inflicted wounds hurt less. I'd read Tennessee Williams. I just didn't expect to be living my own tainted little version of Suddenly Last Summer.
Dan Skinner
#29. I've redone plays of mine and made changes. A play is a living thing, and I'd never say I wouldn't rewrite years later. Tennessee Williams did that all the time, and it's distressing, because I'd like the play to be out there in its finished form.
Horton Foote
#30. 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.
Ciaran Hinds
#31. 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.
Emilia Clarke
#32. We are all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life." Tennessee Williams
Anton War
#33. I was a lusty kid who loved Tennessee Williams.
St. Vincent
#34. 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.'
Adhir Kalyan
#35. I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay.
Donald Ray Pollock
#36. 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.
Kim Cattrall
#37. Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.
David Markson
#38. A lot of people don't know that my background is completely classical. For a while there, I was all about Moliere and the Greeks and Brecht and Tennessee Williams.
Katy Mixon
#39. And, I'd never done Tennessee Williams, and I had done Broadway musicals, so it was a challenge.
Andrea Martin
#40. Laws of silence don't work ... . When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out.
Tennessee Williams
#41. The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.
Tennessee Williams
#42. Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.
Tennessee Williams
#43. Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But 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.
Tennessee Williams
#44. There are no "good" or "bad" people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice.
Tennessee Williams
#45. Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.
Tennessee Williams
#46. I don't believe in villains or heroes
only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.
Tennessee Williams
#47. Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.
Tennessee Williams
#48. Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than
broken down.
Tennessee Williams
#49. 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.
Tennessee Williams
#50. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that.
Tennessee Williams
#51. 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
#52. As for me, no one will ever love me. But you could get used to me, couldn't you, Jimmy?
Tennessee Williams
#54. To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.
Tennessee Williams
#55. I suppose 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.
Tennessee Williams
#57. What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?
Tennessee Williams
#58. I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.
Tennessee Williams
#61. Jim lights a cigarette and leans indolently back on his elbow smiling at Laura with a warmth and charm which lights her inwardly with altar candles.
Tennessee Williams
#62. All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
Tennessee Williams
#63. There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.
Tennessee Williams
#64. That Europe is nothin' on earth but a great big auction, that's all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it's just a big fire-sale, the whole rutten thing.
Tennessee Williams
#67. I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.
Tennessee Williams
#68. Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
Tennessee Williams
#70. Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.
Tennessee Williams
#71. There is only one true aristocracy ... and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!
Tennessee Williams
#73. Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair?
Tennessee Williams
#74. It would be one of those evenings when lady luck showed the bitchy streak in her nature
Tennessee Williams
#76. Later tonight am going to tell you that I love you and maybe by that time you will be drunk enough to believe me.
Tennessee Williams
#77. When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.
Tennessee Williams
#79. I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
Tennessee Williams
#81. The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.
Tennessee Williams
#82. Come on, indulge yourself. You got nothing to lose that won't be lost.
Tennessee Williams
#83. [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
#85. He always entered the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside
Tennessee Williams
#88. And in the spring, it's touching to notice them making their first discovery of love! As if nobody had ever known it before!
Tennessee Williams
#89. 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.
Tennessee Williams
#90. I hope to die in my sleep, when the time comes, and I hope it will be in the beautiful big brass bed in my New Orleans apartment, the bed which is associated with so much love.
Tennessee Williams
#91. 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
#92. At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.
Tennessee Williams
#93. 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!
Tennessee Williams
#94. 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.
Tennessee Williams
#95. Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!
Tennessee Williams
#96. There's no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine.
Tennessee Williams
#97. Life is such a mysteriously complicated thing that no one should really presume to judge and condemn the behavior of anyone else.
Tennessee Williams
#99. Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.
Tennessee Williams
#100. You two had something that had to be kept on ice, yes, incorruptible, yes!
and death was the only icebox where you could keep it ...
Tennessee Williams
