Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Tennessee Williams (American Playwright)

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

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Loneliness

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties, Motivational, Motivation

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

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: Abilities, Work, Talents

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

The future is called “perhaps,” which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Anxiety, Tomorrow, The Future, Future, Fear

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

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

You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Money, Youth

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Death, Time, Medicine

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Isolation, Solitude, Loneliness

Luck is believing you’re lucky.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Fortune, Luck

Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Perspective, Moving on, Risk

Security is a kind of death.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Safety, Death, Kind, Security

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.
Tennessee Williams

To be free is to have achieved your life.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Achievement

Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Memory, Generations, Memories

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Humanity, Humankind

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Memory

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Nature

High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
Tennessee Williams

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: One liners

For time is the longest distance between two places.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Time Management, Time

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

Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Life, Dignity

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.
Tennessee Williams

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

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

Time is the longest distance between two places.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Time Management, Time

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.
Tennessee Williams
Topics: Passion, Enthusiasm

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