Tennessee Williams

Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

Just another four-letter word.

Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.

It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.

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!

When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.

Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.

I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.

Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.

Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!

All good art is an indiscretion.

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.

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.

I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest.