Ben Hecht Quotes

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All quotes by Ben Hecht: Art Giving Habits Heart Love Writing more...
  • 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.

    "A child of the century".
  • The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: 'Who shall be in charge of telling the story.'

    "Elegy for Wonderland" by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959.
  • 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.

    "Perfidy". Book by Ben Hecht, 1961.
  • 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. 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.

    "Let's Make the Hero a MacArthur". Book by Ben Hecht, 1998.
  • The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them - as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.

  • 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 (1954). “A child of the century”, Signet
  • 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.

  • 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.

    Art  
  • 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 (1954). “A child of the century”, Signet
  • 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 (1954). “A child of the century”, Signet
  • Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.

    "A Child of the Century".
  • Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent. 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.

  • The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.

    Art  
  • 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. 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.

    Ben Hecht (1954). “A child of the century”, Signet
  • Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.

    "Elegy for Wonderland" by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959.
  • I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.

  • 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.

  • Love's the only thing I've thought of or read about since I was knee-high. That's what I always dreamed of, of meeting somebody and falling in love. And when that remarkable thing happened, I was going to recite poetry to her for hours about how her heart's an angel's wing and her hair the strings of a heavenly harp. Instead I got drunk and hollered at her and called her a harpy.

  • 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.

  • The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.

    Ben Hecht (1954). “A child of the century”, Signet
  • People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.

    "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
  • 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 (1954). “A child of the century”, Signet
  • 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.

  • I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of nonwriting writer hatched by the movies - as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers.

    "Elegy for Wonderland" by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959.
  • There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.

  • Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you're in over your head.

  • The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.

    "Perfidy". Book by Ben Hecht, 1961.
  • In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.

    "Colombo's Hollywood: wit and wisdom of the moviemakers". Book by John Robert Colombo, p. 150, 1979.
  • 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 (1954). “A child of the century”, Signet
  • He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.

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Ben Hecht quotes about: Art Giving Habits Heart Love Writing