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I don't want realism. I want magic!

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
Blanche
Realism
Magic
Desire

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
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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There's no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine.
Tennessee Williams
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I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.
Tennessee Williams
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Security is a kind of death.
Tennessee Williams
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Young, gifted, and destitute.
Tennessee Williams
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It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.
Tennessee Williams
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If people behaved in the same way nations do they would all be put in straitjackets.
Tennessee Williams
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I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.
Tennessee Williams
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When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.
Tennessee Williams
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Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
Tennessee Williams
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They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!
Tennessee Williams
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Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.
Tennessee Williams
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What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.
Tennessee Williams
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You know, then that the public Somebody you are when you 'have a name' is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath
Tennessee Williams
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Switch clicking off in my head, turning the hot light off and the cool night on and — [He looks up, smiling sadly.] — all of a sudden there's—peace!
Tennessee Williams
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Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of 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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Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.
Tennessee Williams
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Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families
Tennessee Williams