Quote

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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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
Mind
Write
Devotion
Good
Wells
Perception
Well
Inner
Play
Ears
Writing
Pretty
Playwriting
Thing
Stage
Perceptions
Going
Audience
Satisfy
Long
Sound
Mainly

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
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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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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An artist must believe in himself - Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence - but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say - He is vain - but they are affected.
Tennessee Williams
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I'm tired and it's taking an increasing amount out of me, more than I have to give physically. And that's why I want to move to Sicily and buy that little farm and raise a flock of goats and geese. I find it peaceful ... and it would be a nice way to end life.
Tennessee Williams
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A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
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 go to the movies instead of moving.
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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How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
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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No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.
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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In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.
Tennessee Williams
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Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
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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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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Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!
Tennessee Williams
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For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.
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