Tennessee Williams Quotes

When I write I don’t aim to shock people, and I’m surprised when I do. But I don’t think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.

What shouldn’t you do if you’re a young playwright? Don’t bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it’ll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

Time doesn’t take away from true friendship, nor does separation.

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one’s office for a job.

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that’s true of everyone, don’t you?

The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn’t pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It’s very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she’d been stood up by the man she planned to marry.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!

The name of a person you love is more than language.

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.