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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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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
Short
Poetry
Called
Doesn
Stories
Poem
Play
Plays
Drama
Poet

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.
Tennessee Williams
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People go to the movies instead of moving.
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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I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.
Tennessee Williams
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I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by bats.
Tennessee Williams
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Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
Tennessee Williams
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The name of a person you love is more than language.
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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The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.
Tennessee Williams
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We've had this date with each other from the beginning.
Tennessee Williams
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A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.
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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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
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We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!
Tennessee Williams
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Success and failure are equally disastrous.
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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Luck is believing you're lucky.
Tennessee Williams
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We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?
Tennessee Williams
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My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.
Tennessee Williams
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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