Skip to content

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it … Success is shy — it won't come out while you're watching.

— Tennessee Williams Misattributed

Another quote →

Notes from Wikiquote

The full quote is captured in a letter Tennessee wrote to Donald Windham and can be found on pages 57 and 58 of Tennessee WIlliams' Letters to Donald Windham. The quote is not misattributed.

Topics

Success

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

I think that moral earnestness is a good thing for any times, but particularly for these times.

Program notes for a Pasadena Playhouse production of Stairs to the Roof (1947)

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

Orpheus Descending (1957)

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

The Glass Menagerie (1944)

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

The Night of the Iguana (1963)

All Tennessee Williams quotes →

You may also like

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.

Confucius

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

Martin Buber Between Man and Man (1965)

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Tennessee Williams (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.