Top 90 Lillian Hellman Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

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

— Lillian Hellman

52. “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

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

— Lillian Hellman

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

— Lillian Hellman

55. “Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn’t disturb it.”

— Lillian Hellman

56. “Haven’t you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody’s fault?”

— Lillian Hellman

57. “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

58. “You lose your manners when you’re poor.”

— Lillian Hellman

59. “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.”

— Lillian Hellman

60. “Fashions in sin change.”

— Lillian Hellman

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

— Lillian Hellman

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

— Lillian Hellman

63. “Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.”

— Lillian Hellman

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

— Lillian Hellman

65. “Freedom costs you a great deal.”

— Lillian Hellman

66. “Styles in wit change so.”

— Lillian Hellman

67. “Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.”

— Lillian Hellman

68. “Success and failure are not true op-posites and they’re not even in the same class; they’re not even a couch and a chair.”

— Lillian Hellman

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

— Lillian Hellman

70. “Writers talk too much.”

— Lillian Hellman

71. “The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.”

— Lillian Hellman

72. “Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live.”

— Lillian Hellman

73. “Success isn’t everything but it makes a man stand straight.”

— Lillian Hellman

74. “Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.”

— Lillian Hellman

75. “My father was often angry when I was most like him.”

— Lillian Hellman

76. “But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.”

— Lillian Hellman

77. “It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.”

— Lillian Hellman

78. “You can always spot clothes made in a good place.”

— Lillian Hellman

79. “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

80. “How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I’ve always thought.”

— Lillian Hellman

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

— Lillian Hellman

82. “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.”

— Lillian Hellman

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

— Lillian Hellman

84. “If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”

— Lillian Hellman

85. “People always sound so proud when they announce they know nothing of music.”

— Lillian Hellman

86. “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.”

— Lillian Hellman

87. “You don’t always know how to do things when they’re happening.”

— Lillian Hellman

88. “Everybody’s got a habit.”

— Lillian Hellman

89. “If someone had told me, don’t say anything about Lillian Hellman because she’ll sue you, it wouldn’t have stopped me. It might have spurred me on.”

— Lillian Hellman

90. “Don’t you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?”

— Lillian Hellman

91. “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.”

— Lillian Hellman

92. “All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time.” –.”

— Lillian Hellman