Lillian Hellman Quotes & Sayings

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. — Lillian Hellman

Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking ... — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it. — Lillian Hellman

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

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? — Lillian Hellman

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

God forgives those who invent what they need. — Lillian Hellman

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation — Lillian Hellman

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

But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie. — Lillian Hellman

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

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

You lose your manners when you're poor. — Lillian Hellman

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

Freedom costs you a great deal. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

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

My father was often angry when I was most like him. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

You lose your manners when you are poor. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

Callous greed grows pious very fast. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

Writers talk too much. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

Fear comes with middle age. — Lillian Hellman

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men. — Lillian Hellman

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty. — Lillian Hellman

You can always spot clothes made in a good place. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

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

People change and forget to tell each other. — Lillian Hellman

One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion. — Lillian Hellman

Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that. — Lillian Hellman

Some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

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. — Lillian Hellman

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. — Lillian Hellman

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

The convictions of Hollywood and television are made of boiled money. — Lillian Hellman

The happy problem of our time - longer life. — Lillian Hellman

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

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

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

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

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

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits. — Lillian Hellman