Art & Creativity Quote by Tennessee Williams

Art that behaves itself is just décor. Tennessee Williams’s line lands like a sly confession: the work that matters will always be caught doing something it “shouldn’t.” “Indiscretion” isn’t merely scandal; it’s the breach of etiquette that exposes what a culture works overtime to keep tidy - desire, shame, class anxiety, the ache of needing to be seen. Williams knew that theater only becomes electric when it risks embarrassment, when it admits something too intimate for polite company and too messy for moral instruction.

The intent is almost tactical. Williams is defending vulnerability as craft: to make “good art” you have to reveal more than is socially prudent, to let the audience feel the heat of private life in public. The subtext is a rebuke to tasteful realism and respectable uplift. His plays don’t posture as transgression for its own sake; they treat discretion as a kind of lie, a social technology that keeps families functional and people emotionally starved. An “indiscretion” is what happens when the curtain lifts on the story everyone has agreed not to tell.

Context sharpens the edge. Williams wrote in mid-century America, when queerness was policed, female desire was pathologized, and “decency” functioned as censorship with good manners. A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof turn that regime inside out: lust, alcoholism, cruelty, and loneliness are not subplots but the main weather. The quote also reads as self-portrait. For Williams, confession isn’t therapy; it’s dramaturgy - the deliberate, risky choice to make the audience complicit in what they’d rather avert their eyes from.