Quote

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

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

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
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
Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
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
Image
Love is a hole in the heart.
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
In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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
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
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
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
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.
Ben Hecht
Image
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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
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.
Ben Hecht
Image
He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
Ben Hecht
Image
The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
Ben Hecht
Image
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
Image
There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
Ben Hecht