Tennessee Williams Quotes

If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.

In art there is a need for truth, not sincerity.

I'm not just painting for painting's sake. I want to be truthful.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth.

A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Truthfullness to life-both fantasy life and factual life-is the basis of all great art.

The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,--that is the secret of the fine arts.

Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

What I've discovered is that in art, as in music, there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.