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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.

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
Also
Fame
Attract
Writing
However
Producer
Much
Genius
Heads
Mounted
Good
Gets
Producers
Flop
Writer
Director
Steering
Movie
Brings
Geniuses
Stars
Critical
Spears
Jobs
Directors
Bicycle

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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 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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Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
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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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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
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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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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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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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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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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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Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
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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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Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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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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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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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
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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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There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
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