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 HECHTMovies 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.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
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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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Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
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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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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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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.
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.
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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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The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
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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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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 -
The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.
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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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I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
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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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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
BEN HECHT -
In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
BEN HECHT -
Love is a hole in the heart.
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I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
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That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
BEN HECHT -
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 -
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
BEN HECHT -
Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
BEN HECHT