Quotes by Tennessee Williams

Security is a kind of death.

Were all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life.

High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it.... Success is shy-it wont come out while youre watching.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

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

I dont ask for your pity but just your understanding - no not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you and the enemy time in us all.

When I stop [working] the rest of the day is posthumous. Im only really alive when Im working.

Its interesting, isnt it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup.

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.

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

For time is the longest distance between two places.

All good art is an indiscretion.

You can be young without money but you cant be old without it.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it wont come out while youre watching.

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.

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.

“Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything thats dynamic and expressivee--thats whats good for you if youre at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. In the time of your life--live! That time is short and it doesnt return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.”

“You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you “have a name” is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own volition — and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!”