A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
BEN HECHTI 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.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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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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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 -
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
BEN HECHT -
That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
BEN HECHT -
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
BEN HECHT -
In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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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.
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 -
H.L.Mencken’s war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.
BEN HECHT -
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.
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.
BEN HECHT -
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.
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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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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.
BEN HECHT







