Quote

Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.

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
Others
Condition
Egos
Become
Relation
Corresponding
Look
Competition
Distortion
Looks
Conditions
Glass
Must
Vision
Ego
Within
Vanity
Desire
Add
Distortions
Fear
Glasses
Cloudy

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.
Tennessee Williams
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Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people?
Tennessee Williams
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Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.
Tennessee Williams
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Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man.
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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Jim lights a cigarette and leans indolently back on his elbow smiling at Laura with a warmth and charm which lights her inwardly with altar candles.
Tennessee Williams
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Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
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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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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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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To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.
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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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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Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.
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 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.
Tennessee Williams
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Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
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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Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you--gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there?
Tennessee Williams
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When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.
Tennessee Williams