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

Ben Hecht

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

Forget Way World
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.
BEN HECHT

Country White Years
I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.
BEN HECHT

Buzzing Clock Everywhere Hour Learn
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
BEN HECHT

Chicago Offering Yellowstone
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
I’ll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
BEN HECHT

Mad Secret World
Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
BEN HECHT

Day Love Men Valentines
I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
BEN HECHT

Agony Day Dream Valentines
There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.
BEN HECHT

Death Friends Old Silence
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
BEN HECHT

Diversity Justice Safety
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
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.
BEN HECHT

Business Reading Time
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.
BEN HECHT

Envy Guilt Men
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
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

Christmas Criticism Dubious News Praise

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

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

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