The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can’t have both.
BEN HECHTThe honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
-
-
Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
BEN HECHT -
The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
BEN HECHT -
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 -
Love is a hole in the heart.
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 -
There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
BEN HECHT -
I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.
BEN HECHT -
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent.
BEN HECHT -
In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
BEN HECHT -
I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
BEN HECHT -
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.
BEN HECHT -
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 -
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 -
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 -
I’ll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
BEN HECHT