Famous Quotes

Quotes by Tennessee Williams

• A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
• All good art is an indiscretion.
• All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
• Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.
• For time is the longest distance between two places.
• 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.
• I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
• In memory everything seems to happen to music.
• Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
• 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.
• Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other.
• Success and failure are equally disastrous.
• Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.
• 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.
• The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you?
• The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
• Time is the longest distance between two places.
• Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
• To be free is to have achieved your life.
• We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
• We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
• When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
• You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.