Lillian Florence Hellman Quotes

He was getting over a four-day drunk, and I was getting over a 4-year marriage.

I am suspicious of guilt in myself and in other people: it is usually a way of not thinking, or of announcing one’s own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them.

The English don’t raise their voices, Arthur, although they may have other vulgarities.

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.

Well, people change and forget to tell each other. Too bad—causes so many mistakes.

That’s what you always said, success isn’t everything but it makes a man stand straight, and you were right.

I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities. But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is to me inhuman and indecent and dishonorable.

That’s cynical. [Smiles.] Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.