Top 100 Hecht Quotes
#1. Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.
John Scalzi
#2. 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
#3. Lucian [of Samosata; 120-190 CE] was trying to make his audience laugh, rather than start a revolution
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#4. When we feel safe, when we feel we are with someone who basically agrees with us about the symbolic universe, we let down our defenses, confident that our companion understands the symbols that are usually wall up, and will act appropriately.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#5. Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.
Anthony Hecht
#6. How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#8. I understand boxing has been around for so long, and it's old money. The sport has such a history, I just don't understand how it's even a competition though.
Jake Hecht
#9. 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
#10. I think I usually play the woman that, after the person tries to go for some extraordinary feat of romantic accomplishment, they happily wind up with me.
Jessica Hecht
#11. I'm Reconstructionist; I don't serve the Sabbath, but I go to synagogue.
Jessica Hecht
#12. You don't always get to chose who you fall in love with
Stephani Hecht
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. When I had a boxing match, all I wanted to do was put the guy on his back. That's why I chose to chase after MMA.
Jake Hecht
#16. 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
#17. There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
Ben Hecht
#18. 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
#19. You think he has some bomb defusing MacGyver contraption cooked up that involves lube, condoms, and a paper clip?
Stephani Hecht
#20. He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
Ben Hecht
#21. I had the gift, and arrived at the technique
That called up spirits from the vasty deep...
Anthony Hecht
#22. The German mass murder of the Jews ... brought my Jewishness to the surface.
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. Real Evolution is a state of consciousness. To really and truly evolve, means to align with the truth; to align with something other than the illusion and delusion of the ego mind and lower states of consciousness.
Arielle Hecht
#25. Job moans that it is wanton cruelty that suffering people, brutalized or in mourning, should have to relive their horrors in dreams. In fact, why should any of us, in seeking rest, be met with nightmares?
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#26. Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
Ben Hecht
#27. A reasonable scale of probability-what is likely-forbids believing a whole range of imaginative possibilities, even though we do not know anything for sure.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#28. 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
#29. In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
Ben Hecht
#30. 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
#31. The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
Ben Hecht
#32. 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
#33. Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.
Anthony Hecht
#34. I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.
Anthony Hecht
#35. Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#37. Some were taking this or that nervine cure-all, but the best nervine for a man who is not absolutely past repair, is to break away entirely from his calling or greed and camp out on the sea shore ... and patiently wait for the return of good health. James Bradley
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#38. I'll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
Ben Hecht
#39. But it is possible to let go of this addiction. Consciousness is power. Once we are aware of ourselves as a separate Presence from our thoughts, we can then witness them and perhaps notice the addictive quality of thinking.
Arielle Hecht
#40. 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
#41. I look and look, / As though I could be saved simply by looking
Anthony Hecht
#43. 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
#44. Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
Ben Hecht
#45. Doctors of Science, what is man that he
Should hope to come to a good end?
The best is not to have been born.
Anthony Hecht
#46. People always think I'm so calm and ethereal. But my family certainly doesn't feel that way all the time. They tease me about it.
Jessica Hecht
#47. The history of doubt is not only a history of the denial of God; it is also a history of those who have grappled with the religious questions and found the possibility of other answers.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#48. God is logic's corpse, a wound in reason, grammar's empty skin.
Jamey Hecht
#49. The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
Ben Hecht
#50. A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
Ben Hecht
#51. Trust just doesn't come because you ask
for it. It has to be earned. Even then it's usually a
false word people toss around just to get what
they want. Then in the end they always end up
doing the same thing, stabbing you in the back. - Andrew to Vapor
Stephani Hecht
#52. What sparked my interest in the combat sports in general was my older brother. I guess older brothers are supposed to pick on their young brothers, but mine took it to a whole new level. He broke my collarbone, broke my rib, and knocked my teeth out.
Jake Hecht
#53. Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don't know it. So long as you can possibly worry about it, you've got nothing to worry about.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#54. Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
Ben Hecht
#55. We did not make this world...and our childhood inclinations about how to succeed in it turn out to be wrong: often our courage is needed not to dramatically change reality but to accept it and persist in it.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#56. There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
Anthony Hecht
#57. I'm the only one in my family - I'm a practicing Jew - who has attached themselves to religion in a more traditional way.
Jessica Hecht
#58. I don't mean to in any way impugn the makers of Bentley, but that car is nuts. When I do drive, I drive a Toyota Prius. So driving around the streets of Albuquerque in a Bentley made me feel so fake-a-rooney.
Jessica Hecht
#59. 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
#60. My second passion besides fighting is traveling. So, for me to be able to go somewhere like the places I've been is just awesome.
Jake Hecht
#61. It doesn't seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.
Anthony Hecht
#62. I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
Ben Hecht
#63. Though you work like mad to keep parts of you undiscovered, it is horrible to imagine that you will be completely successful. As the psychologist D.W. Winnicott wrote, It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#64. Your staying alive means so much more than you really know or that anyone is aware of at this moment.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#65. Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
Ben Hecht
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
Anthony Hecht
#69. Maybe at 87 you slow down a drop, but between 44 and 64, there is no difference.
Jessica Hecht
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.
Ben Hecht
#74. If you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#75. If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body
Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,
Felt in the tingling bruises of collision,
And known to captains as esprit de corps.
Anthony Hecht
#76. Why is it that men can be bastards and women must wear pearls and smile?
Lynn Hecht Schafran
#77. In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
Ben Hecht
#78. Every time I looked at the sky and at my watch, that monster was still up there.
Julie Hecht
#79. Like belief, doubt takes a lot of different forms, from ancient Skepticism to modern scientific empiricism, from doubt in many gods to doubt in one God, to doubt that recreates and enlivens faith and doubt that is really disbelief.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#80. There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
Ben Hecht
#81. 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
#82. What better is there to sigh for than happiness, yesterday's or tomorrow's.
Ben Hecht
#83. [Based upon the message of "nothing new under the sun" in Ecclesiastes,] If nothing ever changes, then God has no plan.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#84. 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
#85. Working with Bryan Cranston on 'Breaking Bad' has been totally thrilling because he is so clear in his approach.
Jessica Hecht
#86. Of the 60 movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less.
Ben Hecht
#87. Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.
Anthony Hecht
#88. 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
#89. Only when you are dangerous are you truly equal to the world.
Daniel Hecht
#90. I can't wait to continue traveling and do as much as I can possibly do.
Jake Hecht
#91. 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
#92. We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#93. A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.
Anthony Hecht
#94. Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you're in over your head.
Ben Hecht
#95. Yet one of the most important things we have to learn is how to cope with abundance and with our hunger for yet more abundance
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#96. 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
#97. One must devote oneself to figuring out that one must live for the good, for its own sake. It was a secular morality. Contemporaries did not know what to call a thing like that - he questioned their every faith, their every way of life - so they called it atheism.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#98. Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite.
Anthony Hecht
#99. I was pregnant with my first child during 'Stop/Kiss,' and for whatever reason, the fact that I was so physically uncomfortable allowed me to be freer in the role.
Jessica Hecht
#100. Logan couldn't have been more surprised if Satan himself had come up from hell and started ladling soup at a homeless shelter.
Stephani Hecht
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