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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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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
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Actually
Speed
Helping
Except
Anything
Conscious
Refine
Play
Conditions
Rehearsal
Wasn
Hardly
Writing
Written
Plays
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Hours
Aids
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More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.
Tennessee Williams
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Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down... So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function!
Tennessee Williams
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We're left alone with each other. We have to creep close to each other and give gentle little nudges with our paws and our muzzles before we can slip into sleep and rest for the next day's playtime.
Tennessee Williams
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The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others.
Tennessee Williams
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Luck is believing you're lucky.
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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Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.
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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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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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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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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Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.
Tennessee Williams
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In memory everything seems to happen to music.
Tennessee Williams
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The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you?
Tennessee Williams
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Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!
Tennessee Williams
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How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
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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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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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
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When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
Tennessee Williams