Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
BEN HECHTTelevision 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.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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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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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.
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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.
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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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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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I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
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The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
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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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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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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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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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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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People’s sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
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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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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.
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I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
BEN HECHT -
Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
BEN HECHT -
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 -
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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Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
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Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him.
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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