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
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 Literary Figure
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