Lillian Hellman Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

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
Failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.

Lillian Hellman
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.

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
As one grows older, one realizes how little one knows about any relationship, or even about oneself.

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

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

Lillian Hellman
The convictions of Hollywood and television are made of boiled money.

Lillian Hellman
I am most willing to answer all questions about myself... But... I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive.

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
Not like the country? My. I never heard anybody say a thing like that before. It takes courage to just up and say you don't like the country. Everybody likes the country.

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

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

Lillian Hellman
[France] may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.

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 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.

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
Success and failure are not true opposites, and they're not even in the same class. I mean, they're not even a couch and a chair.

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

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

Lillian Hellman
I am suspicious of guilt in myself and 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.

Lillian Hellman
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.

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

Lillian Hellman
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.

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

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

Lillian Hellman
Lonely people talking to each other can make each other lonelier. They should be careful because lonely people can't afford to cry.

Lillian Hellman
It is best in the theater to act with confidence no matter how little right you have to it.

Lillian Hellman