Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
BEN HECHTThe only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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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.
BEN HECHT -
There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.
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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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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
BEN HECHT -
As an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a 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 -
They’re a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time – and they’re phonies, all of them. And I head the list…their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness.
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 -
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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There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
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People’s sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
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Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
BEN HECHT -
A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
BEN HECHT -
The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you’re in over your head.
BEN HECHT -
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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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
BEN HECHT -
The rest of the fraternity is deadwood. Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
BEN HECHT -
Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
BEN HECHT -
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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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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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.
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When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.
BEN HECHT -
I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
BEN HECHT -
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
BEN HECHT