Lillian Hellman

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

“Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.”

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

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

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

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

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

“People change and forget to tell each other.”

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

“God forgives those who invent what they need.”

“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.”

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

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

“You lose your manners when you are poor.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”