Tennessee Williams Quotes

In our society, no one dares to be themselves.

If I start giving people what they like I'll turn into one of them and I don't want to be one of them I want to be one of me.

I know that many people kill off their real personality just to fit into this society, but why do we have to compromise? I never understood that. I decided to try to be myself and to live by my own values rather than those of others.

I always tried so hard to fit in, and then I figured out that I didn't want to fit.

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

Be stupid, be dumb, be funny, if that's who you are. Don't try to be someone that society wants you to be; that's stupid. So be yourself.

Try to find your individuality, your integrity, and make the effort of not compromising. Because the more you compromise, the less you are an individual. You are only a cog in the wheel, just a part in the vast mechanism, just a small part of the mob - not an individual in your own beauty, in your own right. I am absolutely against compromise. Death is far more beautiful than a life of compromise.

Express who you are in a world where everyone is the same.

To be an individual is the hardest thing in the world, because nobody likes you to be an individual. Everybody wants to kill your individuality and to make a sheep out of you. Nobody wants you to be on your own.

I just try to be myself and not conform to something I'm not and just continue doing what I do. I just try not to think about the fact that I'm an inspiration for people.

I think pop culture underestimates people. The message is, 'Being yourself is the worst thing you could possibly be.' But people are still attracted to it.

Sure, I could of done it different... put my clown in a closet and dressed up in straight clothing. I could of compromised my essence, and swallowed my soul.

I've seen a lot of good things and a lot of the bad of what Hollywood can bring. At the end of the day, I've found that when you try and fit in, that's a way to go crazy; you kind of lose yourself. I'm sometimes the different one at the table, but I don't care.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

Pop music allows you to be who you are without having to wear a social uniform or to conform, which some people find impossible to do.

If you try to follow everyone else's mold, you'll probably fail at some point because God created us uniquely for a reason.

I think in society we tend to put ourselves in boxes and corners and restrict ourselves, and we constantly feel the need to not say this or not wear this.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

I know I'm never going to be a big pop star, because I'm not willing to conform.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Get to know the real you, rather than try to look like or dress like those around you.

I do not want to work to correspond to an image.

I didn't try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.