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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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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
York
Tree
Hope
Mug
White
Alley
Three
Alleys
Today
Puts
Years
Christmas
Theatre

More quotes by 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.
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Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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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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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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People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
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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.
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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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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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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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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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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.
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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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Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
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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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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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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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