Quotes By Tennessee Williams

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

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

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

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.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.

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

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.

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

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

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.

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?

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.

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.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.

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

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

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

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

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.