Lillian Hellman Quotes

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

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

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.

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

People change and forget to tell each other.

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.

Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

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

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

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 not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

The only good thing about [aging] is you're not dead.

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

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.

You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not.

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.

Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

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

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.

Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.

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 live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

You can't recover from what you do not understand.

It {France} may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.

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

You don't always know how to do things when they're happening.

No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.

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

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'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery.

You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.

You lose your manners when you're poor.

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.

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

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 tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

It doesn't pay well to fight for what we believe in.

Maybe money is unreal for most of us, easier to give away than things we want.

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

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

History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.

Freedom costs you a great deal.

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

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

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?

Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.