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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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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
Time
Laughing
List
Love
Fight
Lists
Phonies
Head
Symbols
Dripping
Fighting
Town
Phony
Human
Towns
Weep
Humans
Kindness
Symbol
Whole
Hearts
Pretending
Heart
Laugh
Milk

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Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
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Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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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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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.'
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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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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 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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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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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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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.
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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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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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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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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.
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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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Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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