Lillian Hellman Quotes

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

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

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

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.

some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.

the convictions of Hollywood and television are made of boiled money.

Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Styles in wit change so.

You can always spot clothes made in a good place.

The happy problem of our time - longer life.

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.

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

But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.

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

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

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

Fear comes with middle age.

Fashions in sin change.

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

Writers talk too much.

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

Everybody's got a habit.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.

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

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?

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.

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