“They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!”

“I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.”

“Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!”

“As for me, no one will ever love me. But you could get used to me, couldn't you, Jimmy?”

“I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.”

“It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.”

“And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle...”