Lillian Hellman Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

Lillian Hellman
People change and forget to tell each other. Too bad –causes so many mistakes.

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

Lillian Hellman
We had been talking as old friends should talk, about nothing, about everything.

Lillian Hellman
Some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.

Lillian Hellman
I do not believe in recovery. The past with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

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

Lillian Hellman
But he was not a man to leave things alone when the toothache of blind contention was upon him.

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

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

Lillian Hellman
What good is freedom if you've not got the money for it? It's all very fine to go on about Nora's escape at the end of A Doll's House but just how was she planning to eat that night?

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

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

Lillian Hellman
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.

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 it.

Lillian Hellman
You're a toucher: you constantly touch people or lean on them. Little moments of sensuality. One should have sensuality whole or not at all. Don't you find pecking at it ungratifying? There are many of you: the touchers and the leaners.

Lillian Hellman
I am prepared to waive the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you everything you wish to know about my views or actions if your committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people. If the committee is unwilling to give me this assurance, I will be forced to plead the privilege of the fifth amendment at the hearing.

Lillian Hellman
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.

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

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

Lillian Hellman
Lonely. I always thought loneliness mean alone, without people. It means something else. Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

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

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

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

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

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

Lillian Hellman
In the end, they were together for the best of all possible reasons: the sheer pleasure of each other's company.

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
It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.

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

Lillian Hellman