Lillian Hellman Quotes

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

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

- Lillian Hellman

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

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.

- Lillian Hellman

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

- Lillian Hellman

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

People change and forget to tell each other.

- Lillian Hellman

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

- Lillian Hellman

You lose your manners when you are poor.

- Lillian Hellman

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

- Lillian Hellman

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

- Lillian Hellman

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

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

- Lillian Hellman

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.

- Lillian Hellman

God forgives those who invent what they need.

- Lillian Hellman

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

- Lillian Hellman

Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

- Lillian Hellman

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

- Lillian Hellman

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

- Lillian Hellman

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

- Lillian Hellman

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

- Lillian Hellman

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

- Lillian Hellman

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

- Lillian Hellman

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

- Lillian Hellman

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

- Lillian Hellman

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