Best 83 quotes of Lillian Hellman on MyQuotes

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

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

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

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

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.

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

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.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

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.

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

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

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

Fear comes with middle age.

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

God forgives those who invent what they need.

Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.