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Mastery of Creative Confusion
He had a compulsion to be loved and admired that was stronger, I think, than his compulsion to write. Writing was simply the road he traveled to find, with various detours, the admiration he craved. He marketed himself and his work brilliantly, and his satisfaction derived from sales figures and reviews and bold-faced mentions in the columns. There was no satisfaction in the work, in the doing of the work, that I could discern.
I am transported by the work, the writing, the building of sentences, the mastery of creative confusion.
-Tennessee Williams on Truman Capote
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You will be wrong and you will be bad quite often. That is the process of growing. Keep failing, but keep listening and keep learning. Do not let the failures allow you to shrink and to move into some small corner to do your work: Always be big and bold. Take risks. No one grows without a lot of stumbling.
— Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom
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If everyone worked on believing and living well, we would have all the things of which we dream, and we would have a society, a culture, a world, a theatre that reflected the believing, caring people we had become.
— Marian Seldes