Quotes from Lillian Hellman

Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.

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

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

As others grown more intelligent under stress, I grow heavy, as if I were an animal on a chain.

Mengejek adalah cara yang sangat tidak menyenangkan untuk menyatakan kebenaran.

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

I found that Dottie's middle age, old age, made rock of much that had been fluid, and eccentricities once charming became too strange for safety or comfort.

It was in that tree that I learned to read, filled with the passions that can only come to the bookish, grasping, very young, bewildered by almost all of what I read, sweating in the attempt to understand a world of adults I fled from in real life but desperately wanted to join in books. (I did not connect the grown men and women in literature with the grown men and women I saw around me. They were, to me, another species.)

All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time."--

Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.

Very thin ladies, any age, with hand sewing on them, have always frightened me, beginning with a rich great-aunt and her underwear embroidered by nuns. The more bones that show on women the more inferior I feel.

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.

I live in a room and I go to work and I play a game called getting through the day while you wait for the night.

The happy problem of our time - longer life.

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

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

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.

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.

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

Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

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

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?

The judgment of music, like the inspiration for it, must come slow and measured, if it comes with truth.