Birth March26, 1911
Place of Birth Columbus
(Lowndes County, Mississippi, US)
Nationality American
Also known as Thomas Lanier Williams III, Thomas Lanier Williams
Quotes
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
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!
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
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.
We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.
The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
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.
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes, you’ll know you’re dead.
The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.
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.
For time is the longest distance between two places.
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
You said, They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people. — 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.
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out and death’s the other.
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
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.
I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.
Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III was an American playwright, author of many stage classics.
After years of obscurity, he became famous with The Glass Menagerie, closely reflecting his own unhappy family background.
In 1979, 4 years before his death, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Awards and Nominations for Tennessee Williams
Tony Award for Best Play Not About Nightingales
Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play Not About Nightingales, 1979
Kennedy Center Honors, 1974
St. Louis Literary Award, 1969
American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Drama
1962
Tony Award for Best Play: The Night of the Iguana, 1957
Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written Drama Baby Doll, 1956
Tony Award for Best Play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1956
Oscar Nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, Baby Doll, 1956
1955
Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Honored for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written Drama A Streetcar Named Desire 1951
Tony Award for Best Play, Honored for The Rose Tattoo, 1951
Pulitzer Prize for Drama Honored for : A Streetcar Named Desire, 1948
