Lillian Hellman Quotes

68 quotes in 739 categories

• No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.
• For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
• My father was often angry when I was most like him.
• Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.
• The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
• 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…
• Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.
• I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.
• 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…
• Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.
• 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…
• Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation
• Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.
• You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.
• Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.
• 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…

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