Quotes by "Lillian Hellman"

People change and forget to tell each other.

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

If you are willing to take the punishment, you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

Most people coming out of war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort, at the least, and death at the other end, ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes for a time others seem alien and frivolous.

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.

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.

Most people coming out of a war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort, at the least, and death at the other end, ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes, for a time, all others seem alien and frivolous. Friends are glad to see you again, but you know immediately that most of them have put you to one side, and while it is easy enough to say that you should have known that before, most of us don't, and it is painful. You are face to face with what will happen to you after death.

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

God forgives those who invent what they need.

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

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.

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.

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.

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