Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Lillian Hellman
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American dramatist Lillian Hellman.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
God forgives those who invent what they need.
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.
Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.
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.
It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
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.
You lose your manners when you are poor.
My father was often angry when I was most like him.
Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.
Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
People change and forget to tell each other.
Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.
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.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.
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.
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.
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.
No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.
Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?
But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.
The only good thing about [aging] is you're not dead.
Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
You don't always know how to do things when they're happening.
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.
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.
Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that.
For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
You can't recover from what you do not understand.
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.
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.
My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much.
Callous greed grows pious very fast.
Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.
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.
Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.
Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
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.
I'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery.
Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.
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.
You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.
Haven't you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody's fault?
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.
Freedom costs you a great deal.
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.
Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
It doesn't pay well to fight for what we believe in.
Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.
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