155 Quotes by Lillian Hellman

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.

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.

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

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

...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.

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

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

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.