Ben Hecht Quotes

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.

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.

He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.

I know that man who shows me his wealth
is like the beggar who shows me his poverty;
they are both looking for alms from me,
the rich man for the alms of my envy,
the poor one for the alms of my guilt.

I know that a man who tries to convert me to any cause
is actually at work on his own conversion,
unless he is looking for funds under the mask of some fancied nobility.

That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.

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.

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent ... 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.

Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you're in over your head.

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.

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.

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.

The German mass murder of the Jews ... brought my Jewishness to the surface.

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.

There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.

Kindness, tolerance, integrity, modesty, generosity - these are attributes that events permit us. They are our holiday moods, and we are as proud of them as of the fine clothes we have hung away to wear on occasions.

Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.

Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.

What better is there to sigh for than happiness, yesterday's or tomorrow's.

In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.

Tell it, Fanny. About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky. Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson about the desire that stir in the heart. Speak like Remy de Gourmont and Dostoevsky and Stevie Crane, like Schopenhauer and Dreiser and Isaiah; speak like all the great questioners whose tongues have wagged and whose hearts have burned with questions. He will listen bewilderedly and, perhaps, only perhaps, understand for a moment the dumb pathos of your eyes.

Of the 60 movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less.

A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling "Thief."
If he is wise he has not been impoverished.
Nor has the fool been enriched.
The thief flatters us by stealing.
We flatter him by complaining.

There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.

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.

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.

I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.

I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

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. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.

Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself.

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.

Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.

Love's the only thing I've thought of or read about since I was knee-high. That's what I always dreamed of, of meeting somebody and falling in love. And when that remarkable thing happened, I was going to recite poetry to her for hours about how her heart's an angel's wing and her hair the strings of a heavenly harp. Instead I got drunk and hollered at her and called her a harpy.

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind ...

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

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.

McCue: Now, Mrs. Margolies, this is Mr. McCue of the City News Bureau - City News Bureau - is it rue, Madame that you were the victim of a peeping tom?
Kruger: Ask her if she's worth peeping at?
Wilson: Has she got a friend?

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.'

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.