Tennessee Williams

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an' death's the other.

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.

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.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

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!

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.

You said, "They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people."M"What," I asked you, "is harmless about a dreamer, and what," I asked you, "is harmless about the love of the people?—Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams."

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defence against betrayal.

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness!

Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.

It haunts me, the passage of time. I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you. But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary.

I don't believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

You've got many refinements. I don't think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.

Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!