Art & Creativity Quote by Paul Bailey

Bailey’s line flatters Tennessee Williams by refusing to flatter him. Calling Blanche “written with a terrible authority” isn’t praise in the usual literary-awards sense; it’s a kind of moral diagnosis. “Authority” here doesn’t mean confidence or polish. It means inevitability: the sense that Blanche DuBois could only be made by someone cornered by his own material, forced to put a certain kind of fragility and self-invention onstage even if it’s ugly, even if it indicts him.

The canny pivot is “artistic necessity,” a phrase that treats great character-making as compulsion rather than choice. Bailey frames authorship as possession: the “demon” compels, the agent merely schedules. That split is the subtextual jab at the marketplace, where “content” is expected to behave on demand. Blanche, he implies, doesn’t behave. She arrives with the heat of something unmanageable - the emotional truth that can’t be made more “likable,” more brand-safe, more strategically timed.

There’s also an ethical edge to “terrible.” Blanche’s authority is terrible because she costs the writer something: exposure, shame, the risk of autobiography without the shield of confession. Bailey (a novelist who knew the temptations of career and the seductions of style) is defending a harsher standard: the work that feels authored by need rather than ambition.

Contextually, it’s a shrewd way to explain why Blanche endures as more than a famous role. She reads like a necessity in human form, and audiences can tell when a character wasn’t invented so much as exorcised.