I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
BEN HECHTThey’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.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
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I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when life’s hidden. It gives you a chance to imagine nice things, nicer than they are.
BEN HECHT -
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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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 -
A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling “Thief.” If he is wise he has not been impoverished. Nor has the fool been enriched. The thief flatters us by stealing. We flatter him by complaining.
BEN HECHT -
Love is a hole in the heart.
BEN HECHT -
Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.
BEN HECHT -
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.
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As an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
BEN HECHT -
I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
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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.
BEN HECHT -
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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Immorality, perversion, infidelity, cannibalism, etc., are unassailable by church and civic league if you dress them up in the togas and talliths of the Good Book.
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The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can’t have both.
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Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
BEN HECHT