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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

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
Dubious
Tissues
Honors
Links
Hollywood
Honor
Cuff
Paper
Cuffs
Writer
Tissue

More quotes by Ben Hecht

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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.
Ben Hecht
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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.
Ben Hecht
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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.'
Ben Hecht
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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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Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
Ben Hecht
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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.
Ben Hecht
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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.
Ben Hecht
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Love is a hole in the heart.
Ben Hecht
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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.
Ben Hecht
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The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
Ben Hecht
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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.
Ben Hecht
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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
Ben Hecht
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
Ben Hecht
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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.
Ben Hecht
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People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
Ben Hecht
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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.
Ben Hecht
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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.
Ben Hecht
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Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
Ben Hecht
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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.
Ben Hecht
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Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
Ben Hecht