Tennessee Williams Quotes

American playwright (1911–1983)

Thomas Lanier Williams III (26 March 1911 – 25 February 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

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Birth Name: Thomas Lanier Williams

Alternative Names: Thomas Lanier Williams III • Thomas Williams

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Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum!

Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down… So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function!

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

A Prayer for the Wild at Heart That Are Kept in Cages

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

The future is called "perhaps," which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

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

The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.

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

I never saw a more beautiful woman, enormous eyes, skin the color of Devonshire cream.

When I look back at Stairs to the Roof... I see its faults very plainly, as plainly as you may see them, but still I do not feel apologetic about this play. Unskilled and awkward as I was at this initial period of my playwriting, I certainly had a moral earnestness which I cannot boast of today, and I think that moral earnestness is a good thing for any times, but particularly for these times. I wish I still had the idealistic passion of Benjamin Murphy! You may smile as I do at the sometimes sophomoric aspect of his excitement, but I hope you will respect, as I do, the purity of his feeling and the honest concern which he had in his heart for the basic problem of mankind, which is to dignify our lives with a certain freedom.