The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

Statement purportedly made in an interview with James Grissom in 1982; the reliability of this source has been widely disputed since 2023: "Did This Writer Actually Know Tennessee Williams?" by Helen Shaw, in The New Yorker (5 June 2023), with the lead in line: "James Grissom says that he met the playwright and his famous muses, and quoted them extensively in his work. Not everyone believes him." A further elaboration on the issue of Grissom's reliability occurs in "Questions Raised About Book on Tennessee Williams" by Michael Schaub, in Kirkus Reviews (7 June 2023)