Lillian Hellman Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

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 there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world-what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done.

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.

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

You lose your manners when you're poor.

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

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

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.

One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.

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

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.

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

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?

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.

I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I've always thought.