Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
BEN HECHTInnocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you’re in over your head.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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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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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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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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.
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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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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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A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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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.
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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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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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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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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.
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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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Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
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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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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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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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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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I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
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Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
BEN HECHT