Lillian Hellman Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

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

Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking.

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

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

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

You can always spot clothes made in a good place.

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

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

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.

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.

Fear comes with middle age.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The happy problem of our time - longer life.

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

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

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.

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

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

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

Fashions in sin change.

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

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

Styles in wit change so.

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.

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

People change and forget to tell each other.

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.

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

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

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.

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.

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

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

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?