Tennessee Williams Quotes

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

Acting found me. I thought maybe I should try to find it again. We'll see.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

I'm attracted to those kinds of roles that could be good or could be bad, and you just don't know.

I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated.

I like to do drama, something about life that could be disappointing.

I just gravitate to movies where the mystery is the character himself. Any time you see a trailer of something where somebody is questioning 'Who am I?' I'm hooked.

A well-written character is one where you don't know in which direction it's going; the character could spring a surprise any moment.

Those elements that make 'Catfish' so interesting to watch, elements of deception and mystery, make any movie or any piece of content exciting to watch. It makes characters complex and interesting.

I don't even know what I'm looking for, although I hope I'll know it if I find it along the way. Sometimes I want to simplify my life into a simple bare thing. And other times I want to complicate it so thoroughly that everything I touch will become bound in some way to me. I've become quite aware of my contradictions, but there's no true resolution in that.

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

I, too, was carrying around my own fate. All the things I couldn't know sat somewhere inside, embroidered into me-maybe not quite fixed to the point of inevitability but waiting, in any event, for a chance to unspool.

Don't start brooding about that, too," she says. "Everybody's got a piece of stranger inside them. It's what lets us surprise ourselves and keeps things interesting." -Lupita

I'm not in love. I'm not out of love. I'm just trying to find some version of the truth.

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.

Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides.

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

The most interesting characters are those you're drawn to, then repelled by, and then come to understand. All that tension - I live that. But I don't plan the tension. It's just something that should happen.

Life is never straightforward or emotionally black and white.

We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption, but how near or distant that is, nobody knows- not even God.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.

I think she is growing up, and so begins to dream dreams, and have hopes and fears and fidgets, without knowing why or being able to explain them.