I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. Furthermore, I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. Furthermore, I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world.

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Tennessee Williams

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.

— Tennessee Williams

It's interesting, isn't it? . . . The chandelier. . . It reminds me of mushroom soup.

— Tennessee Williams

It was useless trying to explain to Cecil that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, untransferable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.

— Tennessee Williams

It would be one of those evenings when lady luck showed the bitchy streak in her nature

— Tennessee Williams

I’ve been accused of having a death wish, but I think it’s life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever.

— Tennessee Williams

I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything anything I ever did I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.

— Tennessee Williams

Laws of silence don’t work…. When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.

— Tennessee Williams

Laws of silence don't work.... When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant....

— Tennessee Williams