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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.

Ben Hecht

As an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
BEN HECHT

Country Cultured Mind People
Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
BEN HECHT

Product Seventies Waste
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.
BEN HECHT

Directors Men Movie
Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself.
BEN HECHT

Christmas Criticism Dubious News Praise
There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.
BEN HECHT

Death Friends Old Silence
I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
BEN HECHT

Agony Day Dream Valentines
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.
BEN HECHT

Admire Always Dislike Obvious Work
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.
BEN HECHT

Hair Lasts Television
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.
BEN HECHT

Fighting Heart Kindness
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
BEN HECHT

Diversity Justice Safety
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent.
BEN HECHT

Differences Fifty Men
Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
BEN HECHT

Art Fall Medicine Writing
In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
BEN HECHT

Deceit Desire Lying
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.
BEN HECHT

Political Politics World
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.
BEN HECHT

Buzzing Clock Everywhere Hour Learn
I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.
BEN HECHT

Cities Jail Sleep

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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