Quote

Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.

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
Written
Seventy
Seventies
Entirely
Product
Ten
Waste
Products
Movies

More quotes by 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
In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
Ben Hecht
Image
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
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
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.
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
In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
Ben Hecht
Image
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
Image
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
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
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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 movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
Ben Hecht
Image
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
Image
There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
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
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
Ben Hecht
Image
People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
Ben Hecht
Image
Love is a hole in the heart.
Ben Hecht
Image
Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
Ben Hecht