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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

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Ben Hecht
Age: 71 †
Born: 1893
Born: February 28
Died: 1964
Died: April 18
Film Director
Film Producer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Writing
Despite
Medicine
Somewhere
Spook
Progress
Trout
Fall
Casting
Art
Toil
Stills
Nurse
Still
Falls

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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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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.
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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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The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
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People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
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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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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.
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Love is a hole in the heart.
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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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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. 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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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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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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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.'
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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.
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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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There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
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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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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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Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
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