Tennessee Williams talking about "the playwright's illness"

Tennessee Williams talking about "the playwright's illness"

'Someone interviewing me asked me why writers are so preoccupied with disease and death.

"Any artist dies two deaths," I told him, "not only his own as a physical being but that of his creative power, it dies with him."

A play is submitted to so many people and to so many conditions, alterable or not, and to such bafflingly varied interpretations by those to whom it's submitted that it's a wonder the author isn't stricken with incurable vertigo and plummeted irretrievably into a pit of snakes and madness.'

"Tennessee Williams: Memoirs." Chapter 11 page 242


   

Tennessee Williams about: Being a writer

Being a writer (Tennessee Williams)

"What is it like being a writer? I would say it is like being free.

I know that some writers aren't free, they are professionally employed, which is quite a different thing.

Professionally, they are probably better writers in the conventional sense of "better". They have an ear to the ground of best-seller demands: they please their publishers and presumably their public as well.

But they are not free and so they are not what I regard a true writer as being.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

It means any number of freedoms.

It means the freedom to stop when you please, to go where and when you please, it means to be voyager here and there, one who flees many hotels, sad or happy, without obstruction and without much regret. 

It means the freedom of being. And someone has wisely observed, if you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anything at all?"

"Tennessee Williams: Memoirs" Chapter 11 page 230.


   

The Actor's Studio and Tennessee Williams' times of success.

"Kazan had cast the entire show out of the Actor's Studio, an organization that was a very important thing in the great days-I guess I should say the prosperous days- of Broadway, during my time in the forties and the fifties. Those were two great decades of the Actor's Studio. Nearly every great actor of promise studied there. And the Actor's Studio technique fitted so well my type of play. And, the Actor's Studio-with Kazan, Strasberg, and Bobby Lewis-was a great place for actors to go and compare notes on each other's work and it gave them a sort of home base."

"Tennessee Williams: Memoirs" chapter 9 pages 166-167


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Tennessee Williams about "Streetcar named desire" and Blanche Dubois...

Tennessee Williams: Memoirs
Chapter 8 Page 130-131

 (...) We had come to the Cape too early for ocean bathing, it was still icy cold. But i continued work on streetcar and it was in that cabin that I thought of the exit line for Blanche, which later became somewhat historical: "I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers."


Actually it was true, I always had, and without being often disappointed. In fact, I would guess that chance acquaintances, or strangers, have usually been kinder to me than friends -which does not speak too well for me. To know me is not to love me. At, best, it is to tolerate me, and the drama critics I would say that tolerance seem now to be just about worn out.






  

Loneliness. Tennessee Williams: Memoirs (page 99)

"(..) let me say, now, that he relieved me, during that period, of my greatest affliction, which is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like my shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights... "


Tennessee Williams: Memoirs

Tennessee Williams: Memoirs (page 92)

 "After the success of Menagerie, as I've said before, I felt a great depression, probably because I never believed that anything would continue, would hold. I never thought my advance would maintain its ground. I always thought there would be a collapse immediately after the advance. Also, I had spent so much of my energy on the climb of success, that when I had "made it" and my play was "the hottest ticket in town", I felt almost no satisfaction." Page 92. Chapter 6