I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
BEN HECHTOut of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
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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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.
BEN HECHT -
A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.
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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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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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The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
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.
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
BEN HECHT -
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
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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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Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
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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.
BEN HECHT -
Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
BEN HECHT -
The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
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I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.
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.
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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
BEN HECHT -
Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
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I’ll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
BEN HECHT -
Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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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 have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
BEN HECHT -
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