Top 95 Quotes About Lillian Hellman
#1. I wanted Lillian Hellman to be perfect because I wasn't perfect myself. I really wanted a mentor.
Rosemary Mahoney
#2. 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
#3. Are you still as angry as you used to be?' Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical [movie] Julia. I like your anger ... . Don't you let anyone talk you out of it.
Susan Faludi
#4. Lillian Hellman wrote a play called The Little Foxes. In it a young girl tells her mother that some people eat the earth, like locusts, and others stand around and watch them do it.
Sylvain Reynard
#5. Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."
(on Lillian Hellman)
Mary McCarthy
#6. I don't need to be married to Georgia O'Keeffe or Lillian Hellman, but I like being with a woman I can look up to.
Alec Baldwin
#8. The convictions of Hollywood and television are made of boiled money.
Lillian Hellman
#9. 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
#11. Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all.
Lillian Hellman
#12. Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.
Lillian Hellman
#13. The judgment of music, like the inspiration for it, must come slow and measured, if it comes with truth.
Lillian Hellman
#15. Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that.
Lillian Hellman
#16. 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
#17. A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.
Lillian Hellman
#18. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
#19. Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
Lillian Hellman
#20. What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
Lillian Hellman
#22. No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.
Lillian Hellman
#23. Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.
Lillian Hellman
#24. 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
#25. It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.
Lillian Hellman
#26. 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
#28. I don't think many writers like their best-known piece of work, particularly when it was written a long time ago.
Lillian Hellman
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Lillian Hellman
#32. Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
Lillian Hellman
#34. The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
Lillian Hellman
#35. Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.
Lillian Hellman
#37. Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.
Lillian Hellman
#41. 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
#42. 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
#45. Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.
Lillian Hellman
#46. Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.
Lillian Hellman
#47. I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
Lillian Hellman
#48. 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
#49. My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much.
Lillian Hellman
#50. Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.
Lillian Hellman
#52. Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
Lillian Hellman
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.
Lillian Hellman
#57. Failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.
Lillian Hellman
#58. 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
#59. For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
Lillian Hellman
#60. Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
Lillian Hellman
#61. Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live.
Lillian Hellman
#62. Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
Lillian Hellman
#63. It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
Lillian Hellman
#64. 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
#67. 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
#68. Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation
Lillian Hellman
#69. 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
#72. Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.
Lillian Hellman
#73. 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
#76. Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?
Lillian Hellman
#77. A room of one's own isn't nearly enough. A house, or, best, an island of one's own.
Lillian Hellman
#78. Haven't you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody's fault?
Lillian Hellman
#80. It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
Lillian Hellman
#82. People always sound so proud when they announce they know nothing of music.
Lillian Hellman
#83. 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
#84. As one grows older, one realizes how little one knows about any relationship, or even about oneself.
Lillian Hellman
#85. You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.
Lillian Hellman
#87. How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I've always thought.
Lillian Hellman
#88. 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
#89. You don't always know how to do things when they're happening.
Lillian Hellman
#90. Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
Lillian Hellman
#91. Maybe money is unreal for most of us, easier to give away than things we want.
Lillian Hellman
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.
Lillian Hellman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
