Lillian Hellman famous quotes

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

#Habit #Ends

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

#Confidence #Littles #Matter

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

#Inspirational #Time #Mistake

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

#Women #Memorable #People

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

#Relationship #Change #Marriage

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

#Men #Justice #Guilt

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

#Fashion #Peace #Cutting

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

#Fathers Day #Father #Angry

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

#People #Watches #Earth

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

#Too Much

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

#Lonely #Being Alone #Talking

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
-- Lillian Hellman

#Women #People #Injustice

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

#Drinking #Night #People

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

#Memories #Past #Punishment

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

#Believe #Writing #Men

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

#Inspirational #Writing #Talking

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

#Writing #Afterlife #Firsts

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

#Love #Wisdom #Truth

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

#Truth #Doe #Traitor

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

#Embroidery #Fancy #Needlework

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

#Remember #Courtesy #Excellent

Callous greed grows pious very fast.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Greed #Callous #Grows

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

#Men #World #Hunger

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

#Fashion #Clothes #Made

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

#Islands #House #Solitude

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

#Russia #Class #America

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

#Mean #Self #Justice

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

#Mother #Years

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

#Sorry #Want #What You Want

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

#Music #Inspiration #Judgment

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

#Long #Faults #Enough

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

#Music #People #Sound

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

#Age #Problem #Longer Life

Styles in wit change so.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Style #Wit

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

#Thinking #People #Perception

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

#Understanding

Fashions in sin change.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Fashion #Sin

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

#Fields #Brilliant #Theater

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

#People #World #Opinion

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

#Time #Thinking

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

#Men

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

#Simple #Deception #Ignorant

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

#Party #People #Choices

Freedom costs you a great deal.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Freedom #Cost #Deals

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

#Baby #Believe #Views

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

#Rights #Earthquakes #Justice

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

#Lonely #Loneliness #Mean

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

#Success #Block #Good Times

the convictions of Hollywood and television are made of boiled money.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Hollywood #Television #Conviction

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

#Hero #Men #Thinking

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

#Thinking #Guilt #Excuse

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

#Teaching #Government #Decision

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

#Children #Pain #Memories

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

#Littles #Realizing #Grows

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

#Thinking #Eggs #Important

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

#Mistake #Thinking #Past

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

#Belief #Moral #Responsible

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

#Women #Memorable #People

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

#Change #Women #People

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

#Thinking #Long #Pieces

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

#Forgiving #Needs #Invention

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

#Writing #Cost #Guilty

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

#Book #Telling The Truth #Tricky

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.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Fashion #Cutting #Years

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

#Sarcastic #Mean #People

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

#Motivational #Regret #Forgiving

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

#Book #Writing #Thinker

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

#Book #Writing #Play

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

#Writing #Matter #Intention

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

#Poverty #Poor #Manners

Writers talk too much.
-- Lillian Hellman

#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.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Success #Class #Chairs

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

#Games #Play #Nasty

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

#People #Rebel #Unions

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.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Sorry #Hard Work #Want

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

#Dog #Children #Sea

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

#Confidence #Made #Irrational

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

#Confidence #Variation #Statistician

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

#War #Struggle #Ties

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

#Mother #Father #Way

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

#Country #World #May

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

#Say Anything #Might

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

#Lying #Men #Should

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

Everybody's got a habit.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Habit

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

#Life #Night #Games

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

#Believe #Fighting #Pay

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

#Comfort

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

#Thinking #People #Decision

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

#Wanted

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

#Thinking #People #Guilt

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

#Writing #Keys #Typewriters

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

#Real #Lying #Half

Fear comes with middle age.
-- Lillian Hellman

#Age #Middle #Middle Ages

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

#Giving #Want #Easier

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

#Punishment #Issues #Battle