Top 55 Ben Hecht Quotes
#1. I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.
Ben Hecht
#2. 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
#3. 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.
Ben Hecht
#4. The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.
Ben Hecht
#5. In pre-movie days, the business of peddling lies about life was spotty and unorganized. It was carried on by the cheaper magazines, dime novels, the hinterland preachers and whooping politicians.
Ben Hecht
#6. 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
#7. I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
Ben Hecht
#8. 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.
Ben Hecht
#9. Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
Ben Hecht
#10. Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
Ben Hecht
#11. 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
#12. Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you're in over your head.
Ben Hecht
#13. Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent ... 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
#14. In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
Ben Hecht
#15. 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
#16. Of the 60 movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less.
Ben Hecht
#17. I have lived in other cities but been inside of only one. I once wore all the windows of Chicago and all its doorways on a key ring. Salons, mansions, alleys, courtrooms, depots, factories, hotels, police cells, the lake front, the rooftops and the sidewalks were my haberdashery.
Ben Hecht
#18. What better is there to sigh for than happiness, yesterday's or tomorrow's.
Ben Hecht
#19. I know that 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 one for the alms of my guilt.
Ben Hecht
#20. There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
Ben Hecht
#21. Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of cliche.
Ben Hecht
#22. Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
Ben Hecht
#23. Kindness, tolerance, integrity, modesty, generosity - these are attributes that events permit us. They are our holiday moods, and we are as proud of them as of the fine clothes we have hung away to wear on occasions.
Ben Hecht
#24. The German mass murder of the Jews ... brought my Jewishness to the surface.
Ben Hecht
#25. He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
Ben Hecht
#26. 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.
Ben Hecht
#27. There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
Ben Hecht
#28. 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
#29. 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.
Ben Hecht
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.
Ben Hecht
#33. A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
Ben Hecht
#34. The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
Ben Hecht
#35. Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
Ben Hecht
#36. 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
#38. I'll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
Ben Hecht
#39. Since my boyhood, I have sought always to please, but out of a kindness in me, never out of fear or respect for what was in others.
Ben Hecht
#40. The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
Ben Hecht
#41. There's only one law you gotta follow to keep outta trouble. Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doin' it.
Ben Hecht
#42. In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
Ben Hecht
#43. In the court of the movie Owner, none criticized, none doubted. And none dared speak of art. In the Owner's mind art was a synonym for bankruptcy. The movie Owners are the only troupe in the history of entertainment that has never been seduced by the adventure of the entertainment world.
Ben Hecht
#44. People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
Ben Hecht
#45. 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
#46. Socially, a journalist ranks somewhere between the madam of a whorehouse and a bartender. but spiritually he ranks with Galileo, for he knows the world is round.
Ben Hecht
#47. That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
Ben Hecht
#48. 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
#49. Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
Ben Hecht
#50. I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is 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.
Ben Hecht
#51. Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
Ben Hecht
#52. Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
Ben Hecht
#53. 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
#54. The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
Ben Hecht
#55. I know that a man who tries to convert me to any cause
is actually at work on his own conversion,
unless he is looking for funds under the mask of some fancied nobility.
Ben Hecht
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