Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

I suppose the point I have in mind is this—you come to a place in your life when what you’ve been is going to form what you will be. If you’ve wasted what you had in you, it’s too late to do much about it. If you’ve invested yourself in life, you’re pretty certain to get a return.

Lillian Hellman Drama Forgoes a Villain, by Harry Gilroy, New York Times, Feb 25, 1951.

Some kind of confidence, even fake, is needed for any work, but it is particularly required in the theatre, where ordinary timidity and stumbling seem like disintegration, and are infectious and corruptive to other frightened people.

Pentimento
by Lillian Hellman
p.506-507, IBSN 9780316355117

You are good in the boats not alone from knowledge, but because water is a part of you, you are easy on it, fear it, and like it in such equal parts that you work well in a boat without thinking about it and may be even safer becasue you don’t need to think too much. That is what we mean by instinct and there is no way to explain an instinct for the theatre, although those who have it recognize each other and a bond is formed between them. The need of theatre instinct may be why so many good writers have been such inferior playwrights—the light that a natural dramatist can see on a dark road is simply not there.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.12

Many writers work best in times of trouble: no money, the cold outside and in, even sickness and the end in view. But I have always known that when trouble comes I must face it fast and move with speed, even though the speed is thoughtless and sometimes damaging. For such impatient people, calm is necessary for hard work—long days, months of fiddling is the best way of life.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.22

Watch on the Rhine is the only play I have ever written that came out in one piece, as if I had seen a landscape and never altered the trees or the seasons of their colors. All other work for me had been fragmented, hunting in an open field with shot from several guns, following the course but unable to see clearly.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.21

I’m not sure why writers should have remarkable personalities, or, they’re not actors, they’re not society people; they’re not automobiles, there’s nothing, no reason for them to be seen so much or be so interesting. Most very good writers I think are rather uninteresting in a room.

Conversations with Lillian Hellman, p.142

Mr. Alfred: Did you ever find newspaper criticism of your work helpful?
Miss Hellman: Not at all. Never.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.28

[Mr. Alfred = William Alfred, Professor of English at Harvard.]

I really don’t know how it is done. Writing, all writing, is tired up with the unconscious. You remember that Henry James spoke of the long pole that stirred the unconscious: the longer the pole, the more you seemed to move away and the shorter the pole, the closer you came. It is almost as if you were asked which arm you used to lift an object when, of course, you really wouldn’t know unless you were conscious of how and why you lifted it.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.34

As for how they all come together—the plot, the audience, and the setting—it is a matter of your own personality, your ability and interest, and the particular time of your life. It is really a mixed brew, a stew pot in which the meat is as important as any other ingredient.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.34

The production is of great importance, has given the play the only life it will know, but it is gone in the end and the pages are the only wall against which to throw the future or measure the past.

How the pages got there, in their form, in their order, is more of a mystery than reason would hope for.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.11

Sometimes you’re pleased, and the words take on meanings they didn’t have before, larger meanings. But sometimes it is the opposite. There is no rule. I don’t have to tell you that speech on the stage is not the speech of life, not even the written speech….I usually know in the first few days of rehearsal what I have made actors stumble over, and what can or cannot be cured.

Lillian Hellman, The Art of Theatre No. 1, Paris Review, Issue 33, Winter-Spring 1965

I’m one of the few writers in the world who has few ideas ever. I just have to wait for them to arrive. Other people have countless back ideas they are always using. I have none. I have no idea why this is. I just have to wait for a new one to come.

Conversations with Lillian Hellman, p.106