Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lilly" Hellmanwas an American dramatist and screenwriter known for her success as a playwright on Broadway, as well as her left-wing sympathies and political activism. She famously was blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activitiesat the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–52. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a precipitous decline in her income during which time she had to work outside her chosen...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth20 June 1905
CountryUnited States of America
My father was often angry when I was most like him.
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.
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'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery.
You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
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.
Freedom costs you a great deal.
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?
For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.