It's the Intermission
A Creative Coffee Break

I made digests of twenty-five books before I started writing ‘Watch on the Rhine.’ Political argument, memoirs, recent German history. My notebooks for the play run to well over 100,000 words and, do you know, I used material from the notes for only two speeches. Sometimes I wonder—you can’t help wondering—if there is any sense in all that research. But I seem to have to do it before I can be sure that I know what I’m talking about.

“Of Lillian Hellman,” New York Times, April 20, 1941