Art & Creativity Quote by Lillian Hellman

Truth, in Hellman’s hands, isn’t a shining ideal; it’s a courtroom witness with a shifting story. “What a word is truth” sounds almost weary, like someone who has watched language get weaponized long enough to distrust its glamour. By stacking “Slippery, tricky, unreliable,” she strips the term of its moral halo and frames it as a practical problem for a writer: truth isn’t just hard to reach, it’s hard to keep still long enough to name.

The timing matters. Hellman’s life was pinned to the 20th century’s most punishing political binaries: Popular Front enthusiasms, the Stalin question, the bruising theater of McCarthyism. She became a symbol of resistance to HUAC and later a flashpoint in debates about memory and fabrication, especially around her memoirs. So when she writes, “I tried in these books to tell the truth,” the verb “tried” does heavy lifting. It’s a plea and a hedge, a claim of intent rather than a guarantee of fact.

The subtext is less confession than provocation: if truth is “unreliable,” then the audience’s demand for tidy moral accounting is suspect, too. As a dramatist, Hellman understood that narrative makes meaning by selection, emphasis, and omission. She’s asking readers to judge her not as a stenographer of reality, but as an artist and witness navigating a world where “truth” is always contested territory - and where insisting on a single, pure version can be its own kind of lie.