Lillian Hellman Quotes

The convictions of Hollywood and television are made of boiled money.

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it.

As one grows older, one realizes how little one knows about any relationship, or even about oneself.

One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.

Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

Haven't you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody's fault?

I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.

Failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.

The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.

History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.

Most people coming out of war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort, at the least, and death at the other end, ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes for a time others seem alien and frivolous.

It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.

Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.

The judgment of music, like the inspiration for it, must come slow and measured, if it comes with truth.

I live in a room and I go to work and I play a game called getting through the day while you wait for the night.

If someone had told me, don't say anything about Lillian Hellman because she'll sue you, it wouldn't have stopped me. It might have spurred me on.

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

Fear comes with middle age.

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.

It doesn't pay well to fight for what we believe in.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

We all lead more pedestrian lives than we think we do. The boiling of an egg is sometimes more important than the boiling of a love affair in the end.

Freedom costs you a great deal.

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

People change and forget to tell each other.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.

If you are willing to take the punishment, you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point.

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.

I don't think many writers like their best-known piece of work, particularly when it was written a long time ago.

Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.

Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live.

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.

Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.

You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced-although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world-what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done.

Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.

The only good thing about [aging] is you're not dead.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

As others grown more intelligent under stress, I grow heavy, as if I were an animal on a chain.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

I found that Dottie's middle age, old age, made rock of much that had been fluid, and eccentricities once charming became too strange for safety or comfort.

People always sound so proud when they announce they know nothing of music.