Quotes by Williams, Tennessee

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

Williams, Tennessee on elegance
4 fans of this quote   

"All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness."

Williams, Tennessee on frankness
3 fans of this quote   

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

Williams, Tennessee on god   

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

Williams, Tennessee on humankind   

"The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!"

Williams, Tennessee on hypocrisy
11 fans of this quote   

"We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!"

Williams, Tennessee on isolation
8 fans of this quote   

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

Williams, Tennessee on lies and lying   

"When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone."

Williams, Tennessee on loneliness
3 fans of this quote   

"We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life."

Williams, Tennessee on loneliness
9 fans of this quote   

"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."

Williams, Tennessee on love   

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

Williams, Tennessee on memory
8 fans of this quote   

"In memory everything seems to happen to music."

Williams, Tennessee on memory
6 fans of this quote   

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

Williams, Tennessee on money
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Williams, Tennessee on motivation   

"You said, They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people. -- What, I asked you, is harmless about a dreamer, and what, I asked you, is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams."

Williams, Tennessee on evolution   

"I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action."

Williams, Tennessee on sensitivity
3 fans of this quote   

"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!"

Williams, Tennessee on sincerity   

"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

Williams, Tennessee on anger
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Williams, Tennessee on success   

"Success and failure are equally disastrous."

Williams, Tennessee on success   

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

Williams, Tennessee on suffering
9 fans of this quote   

"Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion."

Williams, Tennessee on bohemia   

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

Williams, Tennessee on brotherhood   

"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go."

Williams, Tennessee on change
6 fans of this quote   

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

Williams, Tennessee on suspicion
6 fans of this quote   

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

Williams, Tennessee on time   

"For time is the longest distance between two places."

Williams, Tennessee on time   

"You've got many refinements. I don't think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with."

Williams, Tennessee on women   

"It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses."

Williams, Tennessee on creativity   

"We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it."

Williams, Tennessee on crisis