Tennessee Williams

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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!

— Tennessee Williams

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

For time is the longest distance between two places.

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

Funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths--not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they even cry out to you, "Don't let me go!"

— Tennessee Williams

I don't go in for that stuff. . . . Compliments to women about their looks. I never met a woman that didn't know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they've got.

— Tennessee Williams

Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind, violent.

— Tennessee Williams

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!

— Tennessee Williams