Best 272 quotes of Tennessee Williams on MyQuotes

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.

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

All good art is an indiscretion.

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.

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

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

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

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

An artist must believe in himself - Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence - but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say - He is vain - but they are affected.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done, I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into...

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.

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!

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

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

A woman's charm is fifty percent illusion.

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.

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

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!

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

But since I have a poet's weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.

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

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

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

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?

Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

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!

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

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

For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families

Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man.

Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.

Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!

Guessing isn't knowing.

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

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.

How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.

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.