Quotes from Lillian Hellman

We all lead more pedestrian lives than we think we do. The boiling of an egg is sometimes more important than the boiling of a love affair in the end.

Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.

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.

Maybe money is unreal for most of us, easier to give away than things we want.

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.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

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

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.

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

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

The past with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

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.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

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

History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.

A man should be jailed for telling lies to the young.

No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

Fear comes with middle age.

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

I don't think many writers like their best-known piece of work, particularly when it was written a long time ago.

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 it.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.