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"Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching."
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"Misery suffered did not justify misery to come."

"If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented."

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot, reading is the creative center of a writer's life, you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you."

"I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it."

"When you go beyond your limitations, that is called success."
Explore more quotes by Tennessee Williams


"And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing."


"Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it."


"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. 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. 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."


"The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you."


"Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?"


"Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question."


"Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic."
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