Lillian Hellman Quotes

68 quotes in 739 categories

• It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.
• It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
• God forgives those who invent what they need.
• Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.
• Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
• Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
• What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
• I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.
• Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
• Freedom costs you a great deal.
• Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
• I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
• Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
• Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all.
• Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
• You lose your manners when you are poor.

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