The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
BEN HECHTThe rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can’t have both.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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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.
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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.
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There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.
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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.
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Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
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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.
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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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Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you’re in over your head.
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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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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 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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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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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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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
BEN HECHT