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Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

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
Symbols
Drama
Speech
Natural
Nothing

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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The helpless can't help the helpless.
Tennessee Williams
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Success and failure are equally disastrous.
Tennessee Williams
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Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?
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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In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.
Tennessee Williams
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Mendacity is a system that we live in, declares Brick. Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.
Tennessee Williams
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Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
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
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Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.
Tennessee Williams
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Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.
Tennessee Williams
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I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.
Tennessee Williams
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It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.
Tennessee Williams
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The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.
Tennessee Williams
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Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!
Tennessee Williams
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Oh, I haven't reached any peak. I hit the bottom in the '60s. When a certain actress undertook the leading role in a recent play of mine, she referred to me as that old derelict. Not to my face, but behind my back.
Tennessee Williams
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Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.
Tennessee Williams
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I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II
Tennessee Williams
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Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than--broken down.
Tennessee Williams
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Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.
Tennessee Williams
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For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.
Tennessee Williams