Lillian Hellman quotes - page 2

Lillian Hellman was an influential American playwright and screenwriter known for her socially conscious and confrontational works. Her plays often addressed issues like injustice, corruption, and personal integrity. She became a prominent literary and political figure, noted for both her artistic achievements and her outspoken political activism. Here are 45 of her quotes:

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.

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

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

Lillian Hellman

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

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

I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.

Lillian Hellman

You lose your manners when you are poor.

Lillian Hellman

Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help. Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

Lillian Hellman

We will not think noble because we are not noble.

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

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.

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

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.

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

Fashions in sin change.

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

To many intellectuals the radicals had become the chief, perhaps the only, enemy. ... Not alone because the radical's reasons were suspect but because his convictions would lead to a world that deprived the rest of us of what we had. Very few people were capable of admitting anything so simple. But the antiradical camp contained the same divisions: often they were honest and thoughtful men, often they were men who turned down a dark road for dark reasons. But radicalism or anti-radicalism should have had nothing to do with the sly, miserable methods of McCarthy, Nixon and colleagues, as they flailed at Communists, near-Communists, and nowhere-near Communists. Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help. Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

Lillian Hellman