At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an
escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
I think that hate is a thing, a feeling, that can
only exist where there is no understanding.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless
I know it through having it myself.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
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, The
Paris Review, fall 1981
Guilt is universal.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
We are all civilized people, which means that we
are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
The color, the grace and levitation, the structural
pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful
lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor
thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement
counters at Gimbel's.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Afterword to Camino Real
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, The
Paris Review, fall 1981
The theatre is a place where one has time for the
problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office
for a job.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
attributed, Profiles
