Tennessee Williams

Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.

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

Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die — with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch.

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

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!

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

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

I don't think there is such a thing as a precise sexual orientation. I think we're all ambiguous sexually.

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

The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched with sick envy.

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.

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.

He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.

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

Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.

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

An artist must believe in himself - Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence - but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say - He is vain - but they are affected.

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