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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
Medicine
Somewhere
Spook
Progress
Trout
Fall
Casting
Art
Toil
Stills
Nurse
Still
Falls
Writing
Despite

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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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There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
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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.
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For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.
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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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Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
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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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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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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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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 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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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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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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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Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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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.
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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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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.
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