Lillian Hellman
Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.Collection: Hope
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.Collection: Truth
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.Collection: Famous
It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.Collection: Strength
People change and forget to tell each other.Collection: Change
My father was often angry when I was most like him.Collection: Anger
Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.Collection: Success
Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.Collection: Truth
I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.Collection: Communication
Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.Collection: Failure
God forgives those who invent what they need.Collection: Forgiveness
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.Collection: Courage
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.
Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
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.
Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
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.
Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.
What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
You lose your manners when you are poor.
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.Collection: Inspirational
Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.Collection: Sorry
Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?Collection: Women
The only good thing about [aging] is you're not dead.Collection: Aging
Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.Collection: Time
You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.Collection: Too Much
You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not.Collection: People
You can't recover from what you do not understand.Collection: Understanding
For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.Collection: Life
Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.Collection: Sarcastic
Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all.Collection: Drinking
But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.Collection: Real
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.Collection: Fashion
Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live.Collection: Mother
Callous greed grows pious very fast.Collection: Greed
No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.Collection: Equality
Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?Collection: Thinking
How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I've always thought.Collection: Games
A room of one's own isn't nearly enough. A house, or, best, an island of one's own.Collection: Islands
Maybe money is unreal for most of us, easier to give away than things we want.Collection: Giving
It {France} may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.Collection: Country
You can always spot clothes made in a good place.Collection: Fashion
some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.Collection: Party
Styles in wit change so.Collection: Style