Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams IIIwas an American playwright and author of many stage classics. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th-century American drama...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth26 March 1911
CountryUnited States of America
unforgivable-sin cruelty deliberate
The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.
doors america mexico
Mexico is the front door to South America - and the back door to the states...
men play ideas
The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.
moving adventure black
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.
shadow giants three
We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!
writing play long
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.
fashion art writing
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.
heart mean people
We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.
way bricks cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof
Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.
people damn hard
Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?
writing alive posthumous
I'm only really alive when I'm writing.
writing goes-on world
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.
heart writing privacy
The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.
writing lines
I talk out the lines as I write them.