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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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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
Lines
Creative
Pleasure
Persons
Blockbuster
Person
Poem
Play
Eight
Writing
Line
Much
Type

More quotes by 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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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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I must endure & endure & still endure.
Tennessee Williams
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I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II
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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The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.
Tennessee Williams
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They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!
Tennessee Williams
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In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.
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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When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
Tennessee Williams
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Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other.
Tennessee Williams
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Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
Tennessee Williams
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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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Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.
Tennessee Williams
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Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.
Tennessee Williams
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There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.
Tennessee Williams
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A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.
Tennessee Williams
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Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!
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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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