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I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.

Ben Hecht

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

Director Flop Geniuses Head Producer Spear
He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
BEN HECHT

June Life Love Summer
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
People’s sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
BEN HECHT

Opinions People Political Sex
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 HECHT

Blessing Money People
In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
BEN HECHT

Hollywood Names Thirty
There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.
BEN HECHT

Death Friends Old Silence
The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can’t have both.
BEN HECHT

Art Mass World
A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
BEN HECHT

Connected Men Stupidest
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
The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
BEN HECHT

Eruption Mind People
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
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.
BEN HECHT

Effort Games Years
I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
BEN HECHT

Brain Hollywood Sports
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.
BEN HECHT

Jobs Stars Writing
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
BEN HECHT

Forget Way World

I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.

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I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.

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