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failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.

Lillian Hellman

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Lillian Hellman
Age: 79 †
Born: 1905
Born: June 20
Died: 1984
Died: September 30
Actor
Author
Autobiographer
Librettist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Lillian Florence Hellman
Theater
Fields
Failure
Public
Unreal
Brilliant
Field

More quotes by Lillian Hellman

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Callous greed grows pious very fast.
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You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not.
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Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
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I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.
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If you are willing to take the punishment, you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point.
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No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.
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Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
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It {France} may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.
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People change and forget to tell each other.
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Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
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Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.
Lillian Hellman
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But success and failure are not true opposites, and they're not even in the same class. I mean, they're not even a couch and a chair.
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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.
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What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
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as one grows older, one realizes how little one knows about any relationship, or even about oneself.
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Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all.
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You lose your manners when you're poor.
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Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.
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If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
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Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.
Lillian Hellman