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A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

Tennessee Williams

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Tennessee Williams
Age: 70 †
Born: 1914
Born: March 26
Died: 1985
Died: February 25
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Columbus
Mississippi
Thomas Lanier Williams III
Thomas Lanier Williams
Thomas Williams
Cages
Wild
Kept
Prayer
Heart

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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There's no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine.
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I can find almost anything funny, thank God, so you search for the black, lacy slip that encases the corpse. You know, shift the angle. God may take away, but he often leaves you with a terrific opening line for the next adventure. I would suggest taking it. Move on change the angle look at it in a different way tomorrow.
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And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle.
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Success and failure are equally disastrous.
Tennessee Williams
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But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary
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What shouldn't you do if you're a young playwright? Don't bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it'll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.
Tennessee Williams
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Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.
Tennessee Williams
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Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.
Tennessee Williams
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I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest.
Tennessee Williams
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I talk out the lines as I write them.
Tennessee Williams
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Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.
Tennessee Williams
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The helpless can't help the helpless.
Tennessee Williams
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My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed.
Tennessee Williams
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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 doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its oppositi
Tennessee Williams
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An artist must believe in himself - Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence - but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say - He is vain - but they are affected.
Tennessee Williams
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For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . .
Tennessee Williams
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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
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I don't 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.
Tennessee Williams
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Mexico is the front door to South America - and the back door to the states.
Tennessee Williams
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I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.
Tennessee Williams