The past with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Reflection
What a luxury it is to spend time with old friends … talking, as old friends should talk, about nothing, about everything.
—Lillian Hellman
Freedom costs you a great deal.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Freedom
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge’s chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Prejudice
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
Topics: Reason, Instincts, Decisions
Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Loneliness
For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Guilt
Things start as hopes and end up as habits.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Habit
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Acceptance, Perfection, Writing
It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Assurance, Acting As If, Confidence
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?
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Blessings, Success & Failure, Bad Times
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
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
You lose your manners when you’re poor.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: The Poor, Poverty
Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Equality
People change and forget to tell each other.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Relationships
Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don’t get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Desires
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.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Self-Discovery
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Fame
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
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Listening, Writing
It’s an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.
—Lillian Hellman
Topics: Gossip, Belief
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Tennessee Williams American Playwright
- Arthur Miller American Playwright
- Wilson Mizner American Playwright
- Clare Boothe Luce American Playwright
- Marsha Norman American Playwright
- William Motter Inge American Playwright
- Thornton Wilder American Novelist, Dramatist
- Franz Grillparzer Austrian Dramatist
- Edna St. Vincent Millay American Poet
- Natalie Clifford Barney American Literary Figure
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