Tennessee Williams Quotes

For time is the longest distance between two places.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

All good art is an indiscretion.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

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?

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.

We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!

You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.