People’s sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
BEN HECHTI haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.
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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Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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Love is a hole in the heart.
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
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Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
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I’ll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
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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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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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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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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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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There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
BEN HECHT