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There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.

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
Death
Thing
Stormy
Surprising
Keeps
Silence
Dies
Friends

More quotes by Ben Hecht

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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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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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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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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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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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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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Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
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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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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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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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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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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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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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Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
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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.
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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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