Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
– 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
I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
– Lillian Hellman
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
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
– 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
It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.
– Lillian Hellman
My father was often angry when I was most like him.
– Lillian Hellman
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
– Lillian Hellman
People change and forget to tell each other.
– Lillian Hellman
Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
– Lillian Hellman
Tallulah was sitting in a group of people, giving the monologue she always thought was conversation.
– Lillian Hellman
The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
– 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
Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
– Lillian Hellman
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
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
What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
– Lillian Hellman
Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.
– Lillian Hellman
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
– Lillian Hellman
Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.
– Lillian Hellman
Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.