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
Guilt is universal.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Guilt
I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Kindness
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
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
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Nature
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Loneliness
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Truth, Honesty
Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Suffering
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
You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Youth, Money
We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Solitude, Loneliness, Isolation
A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Wealth
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
Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Help
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Help
The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Hypocrisy
Luck is believing you’re lucky.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Fortune, Luck
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
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: Success & Failure, Success, Luxury
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
Security is a kind of death.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Kind, Death, Security, Safety
The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.
—Tennessee Williams
We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
For time is the longest distance between two places.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Time, Time Management
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Success & Failure, Success, Success is not everything
Don’t look forward to the day when you stop suffering. Because when it comes, you’ll know you’re dead.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties
Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Perspective, Moving on, Risk
Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Difficulty
Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something?
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Talent
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: Secrets of Success, Success
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: Motivation, Difficulties, Motivational, Adversity
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
You said, “They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.”—“What,” I asked you, “is harmless about a dreamer, and what,” I asked you, “is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.”
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Revolution, Revolutions, Revolutionaries
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
Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Enthusiasm, Passion
When I stop (working), the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m working.
—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: Tomorrow, Fear, Future, Anxiety, The Future
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, Work, Abilities
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Doubt, Betrayal, Defense
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
William Motter Inge American Playwright
Marsha Norman American Playwright
Thornton Wilder American Novelist, Dramatist
Lillian Hellman American Playwright
Arthur Miller American Playwright
Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
Clare Boothe Luce American Playwright
William Saroyan American Playwright, Novelist
Edna St. Vincent Millay American Poet
Natalie Clifford Barney American Playwright