Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

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

…theories may work for one person and not another. It’s very hard, at least for me, to have theories about writing…You write as you write, in your time, as you see your world. One form is as good as another. There are a thousand ways to write, and each is as good as the other if it fits you, if you are any good.

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

There is great pleasure in making something out of nothing.

Conversations with Lillian Hellman, p.105

…failure is faster in the theatre. It is necessary that you not become frightened of failure. Failure in the theatre is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing.

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

In one letter [to director Tony Guthrie], I told him that Candid had done bad things to me, I wasn’t working…a few months later he was in New York and we met for lunch. As I came in the restaurant door, a voice on my right side said, ‘Stop the nonsense. Get on with new work, get on with it today.’
…a few days after that, I spent the evening with Elena and Edmund Wilson. During the evening we talked of a man we both knew and Edmund asked why he didn’t write anymore. I mumbled something about writing blocks…
Edmund said, “Foolishness. A writer writes. That’s all there is to it.”
…the hardheaded sense of that was good stuff. But it did not happen a few days after I saw Guthrie. Last week I came back from Edmund’s funeral and sat thinking…The next morning I went through old diaries of the many times I had spent with the Wilsons and found that ‘A writer writes. That’s all there is to it,’ came almost two years after my lunch with Guthrie. But it is true that the next day after Edmund said it I went to work on Toys in the Attic.

Pentimento, by Lillian Hellman, p. 205

I don’t think characters turn out the way you think they are going to turn out. They don’t always go your way. At least they don’t go my way. If I wanted to start writing about you, by page ten I probably wouldn’t be. I don’t think you start with a person. I think you start with the parts of many people. Drama has to do with conflict in people, with denials. But I don’t really know much about the process of creation and I don’t like talking about it.

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

I don’t even know how one would go about teaching the drama. One can’t tell students how to write; therefore why doesn’t drama belong to literature just as literature belongs to the drama? This is not to say that certain technical aspects of the theatre such as stage designing and lighting cannot be taught; it may even be possible to each acting, although personally I’m very uncertain about that. Theatre writing, however, in my mind, is unteachable. It seems much more closely tied to instinct than do other forms of literature.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.32

You have no right to see your characters as good or bad. Such words have nothing to do with people you write about.

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

If you know your people well, they say what they have to say for you almost of their own accord, when it comes to writing them down.

“Women Playmakers,” New York Times, May 4, 1941

The idea that bureaucrats have authority to do anything with writing is enough to give everybody the horrors any place in the world. It’s certainly something to be fought any place in the world.

“Lillian Hellman Says She Found Ferment Among Soviet Writers” New York Times, May 31, 1961