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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

For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.
BEN HECHT

Effort Games Years
I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
BEN HECHT

Agony Day Dream Valentines
There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
BEN HECHT

Age Allies Intellectual
He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
BEN HECHT

June Life Love Summer
Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
BEN HECHT

Product Seventies Waste
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.
BEN HECHT

Fake Men People Thinking
The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
BEN HECHT

Eruption Mind People
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

Bible Book League
A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
BEN HECHT

Connected Men Stupidest
Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
BEN HECHT

Giving Loyalty Men
Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
BEN HECHT

Humorous Moving Time
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

Country White Years
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
BEN HECHT

Diversity Justice Safety
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
BEN HECHT

Forget Way World
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.
BEN HECHT

Actors Faith People
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

Jobs Stars Writing
Love is a hole in the heart.
BEN HECHT

Heart Holes Love
I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
BEN HECHT

Brain Hollywood Sports
I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.
BEN HECHT

Cities Jail Sleep
I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
BEN HECHT

Admire Always Dislike Obvious Work
I’ll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
BEN HECHT

Mad Secret World
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

Lust Number
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.
BEN HECHT

Hair Lasts Television
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

Art Christianity Conflict War
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

Christmas Criticism Dubious News Praise
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

Fog Light Nice
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

Business Reading Time

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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