Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Lillian Hellman - Page 2

You lose your manners when you're poor.

One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.

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.

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

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

Fashions in sin change.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

But success and failure are not true opposites, and they're not even in the same class. I mean, they're not even a couch and a chair.

Styles in wit change so.

Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking.

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.

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

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.

Fear comes with middle age.

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

Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?

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

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

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

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.

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

The happy problem of our time - longer life.

You can always spot clothes made in a good place.

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

Everybody's got a habit.

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

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.

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

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

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

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.

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

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

I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

Writers talk too much.