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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.

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
Effort
Sums
Games
Lure
Money
Double
Many
Required
Work
Tremendous
Years
Held
Hollywood
Game

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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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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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There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
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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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Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
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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.
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Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
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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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