Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Hear
Stamping
Lasts
Acclaimed
Last
Excites
Faces
Described
Language
Ground
Place
Poetry
Seems
Hair
Women
Television

More quotes by Ben Hecht

Image
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
Image
Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
Ben Hecht
Image
In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
Ben Hecht
Image
That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
Ben Hecht
Image
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
Ben Hecht
Image
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
Image
Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
Ben Hecht
Image
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
Ben Hecht
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
Ben Hecht
Image
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
Image
Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
Ben Hecht
Image
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.
Ben Hecht
Image
People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
Ben Hecht
Image
There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
Ben Hecht
Image
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
Image
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.
Ben Hecht
Image
Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
Ben Hecht
Image
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.
Ben Hecht