Lillian Hellman Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

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

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 fashions.

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

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

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

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

Lillian Hellman
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.

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

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

Lillian Hellman
Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

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

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

Lillian Hellman
Propaganda is a soft weapon: hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

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

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

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

Lillian Hellman
I think people always believe what they want to believe, don't you?

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

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
Old paint on a 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. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

Lillian Hellman