When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.
BEN HECHTThe movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.
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I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.
BEN HECHT -
People’s sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
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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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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.
BEN HECHT -
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 -
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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The rest of the fraternity is deadwood. Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
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I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
BEN HECHT -
In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you’re in over your head.
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I’ll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
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I have known a number of Don Juans who were good studs and who cavorted between the sheets without a psychiatrist to guide them. But most of the busy love-makers I knew were looking for masculinity rather than practicing it. They were fellows of dubious lust.
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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
BEN HECHT