TENNESSEE WILLIAMS QUOTES
At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt
acutely uncomfortable.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Camino Real
There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odour of mendacity...You can smell it. It smells like
death.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Funerals are pretty compared to death. Funerals are quiet, but deaths not always.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
I don’t want realism. I want magic!
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so
spontaneously in one instant.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Glass Menagerie
I think that hate is a thing, a feeling, that can only exist where there is no understanding.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
Silence about a thing just magnifies it.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defence against betrayal.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Camino Real
Guilt is universal.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for
others, no sir.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few
amenities of civilized behaviour.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly
catch it going.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live
beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on
paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement
counters at Gimbel's.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Afterword to Camino Real
There is a time for departure, even when there is no certain place to go.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Camino Real
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God
as a senile delinquent.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Night of the Iguana