I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
BEN HECHTTrying 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.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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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.
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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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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 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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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.
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Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you’re in over your head.
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I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.
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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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As an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
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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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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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Love is a hole in the heart.
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There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.
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Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.
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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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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.
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There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
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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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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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Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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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 have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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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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I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.
BEN HECHT