Lillian Hellman Quotes

People change and forget to tell each other.

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

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.

Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’." (on Lillian Hellman)

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

I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

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

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

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

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

Are you still as angry as you used to be?' Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical [movie] Julia. "I like your anger…. Don't you let anyone talk you out of it.

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

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

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.

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

Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell upon them. —playwright Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman wrote a play called The Little Foxes. In it a young girl tells her mother that some people eat the earth, like locusts, and others stand around and watch them do it.

Mengejek adalah cara yang sangat tidak menyenangkan untuk menyatakan kebenaran.

Lillian Hellman once described Shearer as having “a face unclouded by thought.

A story given in Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time. While attending the funeral of Hollywood producer Harry Cohn with a large number of mourners a friend said to George Jessel - I never saw such a mob at a funeral. Jessel replied - Same old story: you give 'em what they want and they'll fill the theater.

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.

[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.

Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks … Or Eric Gill’s copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils aflare, before returning to his wife. P.G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes’s lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan … Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will how through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

People who are in the business of hating the relatively new-fashioned use of “begs the question” hate it vehemently, and they hate it loudly. Unfortunately, subbing in “raises the question” or “inspires the query” or any number of other phrasings fools no one; one can always detect the deleted “begs the question,” a kind of prose pentimento, for those of you who were paying attention in art history class or have read Lillian Hellman’s thrilling if dubiously accurate memoir.

Most people coming out of a 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, all others seem alien and frivolous. Friends are glad to see you again, but you know immediately that most of them have put you to one side, and while it is easy enough to say that you should have known that before, most of us don't, and it is painful. You are face to face with what will happen to you after death.

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.)

But then everybody who has been in the Soviet Union for any length of time has noticed their concern with the United States: we may be the enemy, but we are the admired enemy, and the so-called good life for us is the to-be-good life for them. During the war, the Russian combination of dislike and grudging admiration for us, and ours for them, seemed to me like the innocent rivalry of two men proud of being large, handsome and successful. But I was wrong. They have chosen to imitate and compete with the most vulgar aspects of American life, and we have chosen, as in the revelations of the CIA bribery of intellectuals and scholars, to say, "But the Russians do the same thing," as if honor were a mask that you put on and took off at a costume ball. They condemn Vietnam, we condemn Hungary. But the moral tone of giants with swollen heads, fat fingers pressed over the atom bomb, staring at each other across the forests of the world, is monstrously comic.

I think I meant an intimation of sadness, a first recognition that there was so much to understand that one might never find one's way and the first signs, perhaps, that for a nature like mine, the way would not be easy. I cannot be sure that I felt all that then, although I can be sure that it was in the fig tree, a few years later, that I was first puzzled by the conflict which would haunt me, harm me, and benefit me the rest of my life: simply, the stubborn, relentless, driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be.

Tragedies don’t kill you, she decided, “it’s the messes. I can’t stand messes. I’m not being a smart-cracker. You know I’m not when you meet me – don’t you, honey?”9

in one comic scene, Brennan and Cooper share the same bed, with Brennan’s arm, at one point, draped over Cooper’s. It is tempting to see Lillian Hellman’s hand in such scenes, since she was assigned to do rewrites of Busch’s script. She specialized in the sexual ambiguity of the ménage à trois, as in These Three (1936), a Goldwyn production that featured two schoolteachers in love with the same man. In The Westerner, it is the off-screen Langtry who links Brennan and Cooper. Her aura envelops Harden and dazzles Bean, especially since Bean has to work overtime to pry out of the laconic Harden luscious details the judge slavers over. Accompanied by Brennan’s moist patter, Cooper dryly doles out his delicacies, including a lock of Langtry’s hair (actually taken from the daughter of a homesteader who has fallen in love with Harden). During the Lux Radio Theatre production of The Westerner (broadcast September 23, 1940), Cooper’s droll delivery evoked more laughter than Brennan’s stridency.

Brennan’s identification with the land, and with a persona that seems as solid and enduring as the earth itself, made him the natural choice to play Karp in The North Star (November 4, 1943). Karp, a Ukrainian peasant, is unbowed by the brutal German assault on his village at the beginning of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Counterpointed with Brennan, Erich von Stroheim exerts all of his aristocratic bearing as a German surgeon disdainful of his second-in-command, played by Martin Kosleck (himself a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who often played Nazis). Brennan’s daughter, Ruthie, working under the name Lynn Winthrop, made her screen debut as Karp’s granddaughter, who takes up arms against the invading Germans. She ended her career early when she married. When I mentioned the film to Mike Brennan, he immediately said his father did not like it: “It had too much Commie in it.” Directed by Lewis Milestone, and written by Stalinist Lillian Hellman, this three-million-dollar Goldwyn production was, at the time, considered part of the war effort aimed at bolstering America’s solidarity with its Soviet allies.

It was as though there were a box I kept under a bed and pulled out only once in a while, and in this box were crammed Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers and now Lee the journalist. If I opened the lid, their heads would pop out like jack-in-the-box clowns on springs, mocking me, reminding me that they existed, that women could occasionally become important writers with formidable careers, and that maybe I could have done it if I’d tried.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.” ~ Lillian Hellman

Even when the would-be lover himself, without pressure from an outside advisor, longs to fall in love with a particular person, it is not within his control. Lillian Hellman, writing about her friend Arthur Cowan, who had declared her too old for him, finally divined what she thought was his true reticence in relation to her: “I was what he wanted to want, could not ever want, and that must have put an end to an old dream about the kind of life that he would now have because he didn’t really want it.” In fact, he seemed to prefer fashion models. It is for good reason that Cupid is known to be willful, mischievous, and sometimes even perverse. Love comes when it does.

If that was a real question, there wasn’t time for me to answer because a very smartly dressed woman flared over and began talking to him, standing close with her fists on the hips of her slim-cut skirt, blocking him from view. This was Lillian Hellman, I would soon learn. She and Ernest and the others in the room made up the newly formed Contemporary Historians, a corporation bent on funding a documentary film that would help Spain acquire ambulances and other kinds of support. The filmmaker was Dutch, apparently, and already over in Spain with his Norwegian cameraman. Other members of the Historians were John Dos Passos, Archie MacLeish, and Evan Shipman, all writers big enough to cast shadows. The room seemed full of them as I sat in my blue chair, wondering how I might break in.

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 was so often silent angry with Hammett for making the situation hard on me, not knowing then that the dying do not, should not, be asked to think about anything but their own minute of running time.