Lillian Hellman Quotations

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

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

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

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

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

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

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

God forgives those who invent what they need.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

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

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

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.

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

You lose your manners when you are poor

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.

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

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

God helps all the children as they move into a time of life they do not understand and must struggle through with precepts they have picked from the garbage can of older people, clinging with the passion of the lost to odds and ends that will mess th

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their finest hour.

It may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant

Tallulah was sitting in a group of people, giving the monologue she always thought was conversation.

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

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.

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.

The happy problem of our time - longer life.

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

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

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.

My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much.

Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking ...

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.

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.

I am suspicious of guilt in myself and in other people; it is usually a way of not thinking, or of announcing one's own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them fast.

You lose your manners when you're poor.

Writers talk too much.

Success and failure are not true op-posites and they're not even in the same class; they're not even a couch and a chair.

How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I've always thought.

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

Fear comes with middle age.

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.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

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

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.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

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

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

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

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

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.

Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.

Old paint on 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.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

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.

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

You can always spot clothes made in a good place.

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

some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.

A room of one's own isn't nearly enough. A house, or, best, an island of one's own.

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.

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

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

Fashions in sin change.

You can't recover from what you do not understand.

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

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

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.

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.

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

It {France} may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.

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.

Everybody's got a habit.

You don't always know how to do things when they're happening.

A man should be jailed for telling lies to the young.

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.

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

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

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

We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and to live out our lives. Dear God, that's all we can promise in truth.

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

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.

Maybe money is unreal for most of us, easier to give away than things we want.

Styles in wit change so.

Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all.

I'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery.

You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

Freedom costs you a great deal.