Lillian Hellman Quotes on Writing

6 quotes

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

  2. 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.

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

  4. They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

  5. What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

  6. Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.

    #38 Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

All Lillian Hellman quotes