tennessee williams Quotes

My places were emotional, primarily. I wrote of locales in which I had lived, or in which I imagined I could live, but the topography was primal and sexual and terminal. It bore no distinct architecture or design or dialect. It was merely human and in peril, which is to say universal. But on Royal and Coliseum and Vista--streets I cannot relinquish--I found my places and I dreamed a narrative. Can I go there and find it again?"--Tennessee Williams

- James Grissom, Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog

It would be one of those evenings when lady luck showed the bitchy streak in her nature

- Tennessee Williams

People go to the movies instead of moving.

- Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

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.

- Tennessee Williams

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

Memory, of course, is unreliable, often evil, but it is the source of our identity."--Tennessee Williams

- James Grissom

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.--Blanche Dubois

- Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

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

- Tennessee Williams

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

- Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams

...love, all at once and much, much too completely. It's like you suddenly turn a blinding light on something that had always been half a shadow...

- Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays

You focus on telling stories,
we do everything else.