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 HECHTThe 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.
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’ll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
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There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
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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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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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Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
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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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Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you’re in over your head.
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A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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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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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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Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That’s New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then – the alley.
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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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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.
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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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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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Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
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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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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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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