Tennessee Williams Quotes

I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

With writing and publishing, my only aim is to live in the aesthetic pleasure dome.

I'd always fantasized about writing a new play. Even when I had all this success in television, what I was daydreaming about in my dressing room is that one day I would do it.

When I draw the scene that I'd been dreaming about or had always wanted to draw, that is the time that I'm happiest.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.

My great joy is to give form to reality. Music is a great release, a great enjoyment to me. Eventually I'd like to write something of great importance. That's my ambition - to write something worthwhile.

The artist finds a greater pleasure in painting than in having completed the picture.

Write for pleasure and publish for money.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

For many playwrights, they write the plays anyway because they've got to be, the work has been started, it's got to be finished, but we all long, I think, to see the plays fleshed out on stage and I'm exactly like that. Yes, I'm not satisfied until I actually see it on stage.

Composing gives me great pleasure... there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.

I'm more interested in writing than in performing.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Writing, producing and directing, I must say, is incredibly satisfying and gratifying.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

The more I paint the more I like everything.