Tennessee Williams (1911–83) was an American dramatist celebrated for the themes and the emotions he explored in his plays, many of which were adapted into movies, as well as for his gallery of memorable characters. He is considered the most important Southern playwright of the twentieth century, perhaps second only to Eugene O’Neill among all American playwrights.
Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams studied in Missouri, Iowa, and at Columbia University. He achieved success with the semi-autobiographical The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947,) which deal with the tragedy of vulnerable heroines living in delicate make-believe worlds that are crushed by brutal reality. His other prominent works include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and The Night of the Iguana (1961.)
Williams also composed poetry, short stories, and two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975.) His autobiographical Memoirs (1975,) written during a long illness that followed his psychiatric breakdown, are the revelations of a homosexual outsider living with the burden of an unforgiving preoccupation with shame.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Tennessee Williams
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: God
You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Money, Youth
But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Spirit
Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it … Success is shy – it won’t come out while you’re watching.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Success, Secrets of Success
Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Suffering
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Memories, Generations, Memory
Time is the longest distance between two places.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Time Management, Time
The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: One liners
I wrote because I had to. I couldn’t stop. There wasn’t anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I’d still be writing. It’s beyond a compulsion.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Talents, Abilities, Work
Every artist has a basic premise pervading his whole life, and that premise can provide the impulse to everything he creates. For me the dominating premise has been the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by circumstance.
—Tennessee Williams
When I stop (working), the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m working.
—Tennessee Williams
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.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Luxury, Success & Failure, Success
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.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Love
There is a time for departure, even when there’s no certain place to go.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Change, Life, Uncertainty, Moving on, Doubt, Time
We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Loneliness, Solitude, Isolation
We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
Guilt is universal.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Guilt
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Nature
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Memories, Memory
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.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Society
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Help
Luck is believing you’re lucky.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Luck, Fortune
A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Wealth
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
Topics: Creativity
Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.
—Tennessee Williams
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death’s the other.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lies, Lying
You’ve got many refinements. I don’t think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Women
Security is a kind of death.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Security, Kind, Death, Safety
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!
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Sincerity
The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.
—Tennessee Williams
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