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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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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
Would
People
Behaved
Nations
Way

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
Tennessee Williams
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Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?
Tennessee Williams
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It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.
Tennessee Williams
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Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.
Tennessee Williams
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We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.
Tennessee Williams
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People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.
Tennessee Williams
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Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.
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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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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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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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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Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.
Tennessee Williams
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Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.
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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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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There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.
Tennessee Williams
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I'm not in sympathy with Communism except for populations which are in a state of peasantry, actually hungry and starving. The ideal state for me is some form of Socialism, which doesn't yet exist, as far as I know, which doesn't repress the arts, or any race. Consequently I'm not a political person ... except that I'm a revolutionary.
Tennessee Williams
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The helpless can't help the helpless.
Tennessee Williams
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Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people?
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