Quotes by Tennessee Williams

About Tennessee Williams:

Thomas Lanier is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th century American drama.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

...love, all at once and much, much too completely. It's like you suddenly turn a blinding light on something that had always been half a shadow...

Tennessee Williams

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

Tennessee Williams

Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!

Tennessee Williams

You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!

Tennessee Williams

Las vidas de todas las personas, ¿qué son sino rastros de escombro... cada día más escombro... más escombro... largos, muy largos rastros de escombros que nada puede limpiar más que la muerte?

Tennessee Williams

CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table. GRACE: -Is that an order? CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests. GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down]

Tennessee Williams

I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

Tennessee Williams

Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it.

Tennessee Williams

Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.

Tennessee Williams

Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven't a...

Tennessee Williams

I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.

Tennessee Williams

Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then ... you die, or find something else.

Tennessee Williams

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

Tennessee Williams

Time is the longest distance between two places.

Tennessee Williams

In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.

Tennessee Williams

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

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

Tennessee Williams

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other.

Tennessee Williams

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

Tennessee Williams

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Tennessee Williams

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

Tennessee Williams

Author Bio

  • NameTennessee Williams
  • DescriptionAmerican playwright
  • AliasesThomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III; Thomas Lanier Williams III
  • BornMarch 26, 1911
  • DiedFebruary 25, 1983
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Novelist; Screenwriter; Writer
  • AwardsPulitzer Prize For Drama