I’ll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
BEN HECHTI’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
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The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them.
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I discovered early in my movie work that a movies never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.
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I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.
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As an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.
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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women’s hair rhapsodically described, women’s faces acclaimed in odelike language.
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I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
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They’re a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time – and they’re phonies, all of them. And I head the list…their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness.
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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
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There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.
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Socially, a journalist ranks somewhere between the madam of a whorehouse and a bartender. but spiritually he ranks with Galileo, for he knows the world is round.
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Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent.
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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The producer, director and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it’s a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it’s a flop.
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For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.
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Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
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That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
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Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It’s just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.
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Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself.
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There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
BEN HECHT